Legacies of Destruction: Architecture as a Nationalist Battleground in

Benjamin Kinney Harris

A thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in International Studies: Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia

University of Washington

2021

Committee:

Bojan Belić

Daniel Chirot

Scott Radnitz

Program Authorized to Offer Degree:

Jackson School of International Studies

© Copyright 2021

Benjamin Kinney Harris

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University of Washington

Abstract

Legacies of Destruction: Architecture as a Nationalist Battleground in Kosovo

Benjamin Kinney Harris

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:

Bojan Belić

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Architectural destruction is often perceived as inevitable collateral damage during modern conflict, but a major facet of the of 1998-9 and its aftermath was the deliberate targeting and demolition of architectural heritage on a massive scale. Both Serbian and Kosovar Albanian nationalists participated in this desecration, the most widespread wave of violence against religious architecture on European soil since the infamous Kristallnacht riots under ’s Third Reich. This thesis explains this destruction through analysis of the chauvinist nationalist narratives endorsed by both Serbian and Kosovar Albanian leaders and media which reframed architectural heritage as symbols of oppression and trauma requiring destruction. For both and Kosovar , destroying the opposing nation’s architecture came to be understood as central to a concentrated effort towards purifying the Kosovar cultural landscape and asserting ownership. This thesis intends primarily to answer how nationalist narratives of both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians centered the sacred architecture of the opposing nation as targets of violence and why these efforts proved so devastating. Through analysis of key figures, events, and cases of architectural destruction, I argue that the nationalist narratives of these two nations transformed architecture into emblems representing myths of supremacy, fears of destruction, and historical trauma.

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Acknowledgements

This thesis could not have been completed without the encouragement and assistance of numerous colleagues and mentors around the world. First and foremost, I must recognize my partner Vladimir Kremenović for their immeasurable support and collaborative insight throughout this research and writing process. Words cannot express my eternal gratitude. Special thanks to my mother, Katy Kinney, for being an invaluable sounding board on our walks around

Green Lake. Thanks to my father, John Harris, for supporting my return to academia and that first trip to the Balkans that solidified my fascination with the region.

My deepest gratitude to the instructors who have helped me discover and hone my academic interest in Balkan nationalist history. Thanks to my high school history teacher Dave

Parsons for helping me recognize and embrace my passion for studying the past. Special thanks to Middlebury College professor Michael Geisler for encouraging my interest in and introducing me to ethnosymbolist theory. My deepest thanks to Middlebury College professor

Febe Armanios, without whom I may never have gained such a tremendous curiosity for Balkan history. Thank you for your guidance and friendship.

Special thanks to my Balkan friends and family who have helped challenge my preconceptions about this endlessly complex region and helped me to feel at home on the other side of the world. Thanks to Branka, Zora, and Draško Kremenović of Banja Luka, to Luka

Mihajlović of Knjaževac, to Miloš Stijepić of Prijedor, to Sava Petović of Tivat, to Milka

Murdjeva of Kavadarci, and to my kuma, Jelena Stefanovska of Dubica. Hvala puno!

Thank you to my committee members and the other University of Washington professors who have helped encourage my interest in this topic and offered me their expert feedback.

Thanks to Daniel Chirot for taking time out of his last quarter as a University of Washington

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professor (and first quarter of retirement!) to serve on my committee. Thank you to Scott Radnitz

for his thoughtful edits and support. And hvala to Bojan Belić for both two years of Serbian

language instruction and so much help in this endeavor as my supervisory committee chair.

Finally, many thanks to my friends for keeping me sane throughout this master’s degree, especially Scott Collins, Kate Hammonds, and Amy Spens. And to new friends made through this REECAS master’s program: Marisa Dodd, Anastasia Kharitonova-Gomez, Kate Peterson,

Bob Snyder, Bekah Welch, and Miriam Wojtas – I could not have asked for a more supportive cohort. Thank you for all the laughs along the way.

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Table of Contents

Author’s Note on Spellings...... page 8

Historical Timeline of Kosovo, 1385 to Present...... page 10

Introduction...... page 12

Nationalist Theory: A Brief Overview...... page 22

Methodology and Limitations...... page 28

Research Question and Hypothesis...... page 32

Chapter One: Myths of Supremacy...... page 33

Chapter Two: Fears of Extermination...... page 49

Chapter Three: Historical Trauma...... page 65

Conclusion...... page 75

Appendices...... page 85

Bibliography...... page 107

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Author’s Note on Spellings

The Oxford University Press style manual once stated: “if you take hyphens seriously,

you will surely go mad.”1 Nowhere, perhaps, is this dictum more applicable than in academic study of the Balkans, where alternative place names and terms constantly signal national

allegiances and carry inevitable political implications. Attempting to use unbiased geopolitical

and ethnographic language in discussing Balkan nationalism requires tremendous patience for

multiple spellings and phrasings – patience then required of any reader.

In this thesis, I have adopted spellings of place names. For example, I will refer to the region of Kosovo and not Kosova as it is spelled in the .2

However, I will not be using the Serbian government’s official name of the region, Kosovo i

Metohija, due to the politically (and religiously) charged nature of this label.3 When I first

introduce a Serbian toponym, I will, however, write the Albanian alternative in parentheses. For

example, the capital of Kosovo is Priština (Prishtinë). For specific ethnographic terms, such as

tekke or kulla, I have chosen to use the anglicized spellings in the text while listing Serbian and

Albanian spellings in the footnotes when the term is first introduced. Tables containing Serbian

and Albanian alternative spellings of all toponyms and region-specific terms used in this thesis

may be found in Appendix A, ordered by their first occurrence in the text.

1 The Economist: Johnson Books & Arts Column, “Hysteria Over Hyphens,” The Economist, 10 June 2017. 2 The Serbian name Kosovo is the Serbian neuter possessive adjective of kos, meaning ‘blackbird,’ and derives from the battlefield Kosovo Polje whereupon the was fought in 1389. This thesis will refer to Kosovo as a geographic ‘region’ except when explicitly discussing issues of its political organization – reference to Kosovo as a ‘region’ is not meant to minimize or challenge Kosovo’s current status as an autonomous country, but rather acknowledge the fact that Kosovo has held numerous political designations (vilayet, territory, province, autonomous province, etc) across the span of history discussed here. 3 Kosovo i Metohija remains the Serbian Government’s official designation for the region of Kosovo; the name is politically and religiously charged because the toponym Metohija derives from a Greek word meaning ‘monastic estates,’ a reference to the large number of Serbian Orthodox monasteries in the region. The name has been cited by numerous Albanian scholars as problematic due to its implication that Kosovo remains defined by its Serbian Orthodox history. 8

I have also chosen to discuss the Serbs as a people rather than Serbians but to refer to

Serbian leaders or actions. While some scholars insist upon referring to Albanians within

Kosovo as ethnic Albanians to distinguish them from Albanians within , I refer to them as Kosovar Albanians.4 While I generally have chosen not to anglicize Albanian or Serbian names of people or places, I have made notable exceptions in using , , and

Yugoslavia – not Beograd, Srbija, and Jugoslavija – as changing these extremely familiar anglicizations would invite confusion.

These linguistic decisions should be understood as practical rather than political. In the dearth of apolitical linguistic standards, I have felt it necessary to delineate my own.

4 Tim Judah, “Author’s Note,” The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Third Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale U P, 2009), xvi. 9

Historical Timeline of Kosovo, 1385 to Present

September 1385 – Ottoman Sultanate mounts half-century conquest of the Western Balkans

June 1389 – Ottoman Sultanate seizes control of Kosovo in the aftermath of the tactically inconclusive Battle of Kosovo (fought on 15 June 1389)

1389 to 1912 – Kosovo under Ottoman rule

June 1878 – Albanians from four Ottoman vilayets establish League of Prizren to advance Albanian national cohesion and sovereignty5

1912 – Kosovo vilayet conquered from Ottoman Sultanate by Serbia during First Balkan War

1918 to 1941 – Kosovo part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929), divided between banovinas6

1941 to 1944 – majority of Kosovo assigned to Fascist Albania following Axis invasion of Kingdom of Yugoslavia; widespread persecution of Serbs throughout Kosovo

1946 – Kosovo given status as an autonomous region of Serbia within Socialist Yugoslavia

1947 to 1968 – Priština Bazaar destroyed in phases by the Yugoslav government as part of official modernization policy

November 1968 – mass Kosovar Albanian protests demand republic status for Kosovo within Yugoslavia and an Albanian-language university; in Priština, protests invoke destruction of the Priština Bazaar as symbol of Yugoslav oppression

February 1974 – Kosovo gains autonomous status within Socialist Yugoslavia

March 1981 – widespread rioting throughout Kosovo results in mass arrests and dismissals of Kosovar Albanians from state positions; Patriarchal Monastery of Peć set on fire by Kosovar Albanians; Yugoslav police presence increased throughout region

September 1986 – Belgrade leak excerpts from the unpublished Memorandum on Yugoslavia’s Situation by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, inflaming Serbian nationalist fervor and fears over an imagined genocide in Kosovo

March 1989 – Kosovo’s autonomous status within Socialist Yugoslavia revoked; Kosovo returns to being directly controlled by Serbia

May 1989 – Slobodan Milošević becomes within Socialist Yugoslavia

5 A vilayet (vilajet; vilajeti) was an upper-level Ottoman administrative unit. 6 Banovinas (banovine; banovinë) were administrative units used during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, named after rivers in an attempt to deter nationalist affiliations. 10

June 1989 – Slobodan Milošević addresses masses of Serbian nationalists at Kosovo Polje on the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo

September 1990 – Kosovar Albanians proclaim Constitution of Republic of Kosovo, resulting in a massive crackdown by Milošević government; all Albanians dismissed from state positions

1991 to 1997 – Kosovar Albanians effectively living under Serbian occupation; Kosovar Albanians blocked from most education and employment opportunities by Milošević regime

1997 – Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) makes first public appearance, taking credit for a number of police station bombings

March 1998 – Serbian military kill fifty-one members of Kosovar Albanian Jashari family, prompting widespread Kosovar Albanian support of the KLA; Kosovo War widely recognized by international political community and media

July 1998 – major KLA offensive on the town of Orahovac includes organized attacks on Serbian Orthodox monasteries such as Zočište Monastery

March 1999 – Serbian police, military, and paramilitary kill, burn, rape, loot, and expel approximately 850,000 Kosovar Albanians from region; Serbian police destroy the historic League of Prizren Museum with rifle-propelled grenades; NATO bombardment begins

May 1999 – Serbian military troops launch incendiary grenades throughout the Ottoman-era city center of Đakovica, specifically targeting Kosovar Albanian religious and historic sites

June 1999 – NATO bombardment of Serbia ends; NATO and Serbia sign Military Technical Agreement to end Kosovo War; Mission in Kosovo established; Serbian police burn central historical archives of the Islamic Community of Kosovo in Priština

June to July 1999 – more than 140 Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and religious sites destroyed by KLA

March 2004 – mass rioting across Kosovo results in nineteen deaths, thousands of displaced Serbs, and the destruction of thirty-six Serbian Orthodox churches (including Devič Monastery and the UNESCO World Heritage listed Church of the Virgin of Ljeviš)

February 2008 – Kosovo unilaterally declares independence as the Republic of Kosovo

July 2010 – International Court of Justice affirms that Kosovo did not violate international law through unilateral declaration of independence, resulting in widespread international recognition of Kosovar independence

March 2011 to time of writing (May 2021) – peace talks remain ongoing between the governments of the independent Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia

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Introduction

During the Kosovo War of 1998-1999 and in the years immediately following the

conflict, several hundred monasteries, religious monuments, churches, Islamic libraries, and

were targeted, looted, and destroyed not just by militia groups but also by civilian

mobs. The wave of desecration left the majority of Kosovo’s cemeteries vandalized, the majority

of its churches ruined, and 225 of Kosovo’s 600 mosques with toppled or “decapitated” minarets.7 Many of the targeted sacred sites dated from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries;

twelve of the destroyed properties are listed as UNESCO world heritage sites.8 Historians have

considered the scale of architectural cultural destruction unparalleled in Europe since the

infamous Kristallnacht riots under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.9

Despite widespread international condemnation of this violence against religious

architecture, few efforts have been made to explain the unprecedented scale of destruction,

assign responsibility for the damages incurred, or investigate the underlying sociopolitical

conditions influencing these dramatic outcomes. Kosovar Albanian and Serbian authorities,

social movements, and intellectuals have generally resisted attempts to publicly grapple with the

roles of their national narratives in this violence, so numerous questions remain unanswered and

unresolved. Most crucially, there is no consensus within Kosovo or the broader international

community of how leaders – in Kosovo, in the Western Balkans, and beyond – can hope to

prevent this devastating history from repeating itself. Through this thesis, I will demonstrate how

Serbian and Kosovar Albanian nationalist narratives weaponized chauvinist myths, fears, and

traumas against architectural heritage and thus ensured its systematic destruction.

7 Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Palo Alto: Stanford U P, 2010), 87. 8 Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Third Edition (New Haven: Yale U P, 2009), 335. 9 Herscher, Ibid, 87. 12

The widespread desecration of religious monuments and structures incurred in Kosovo

during the is remarkable for its scale but neither unique nor isolated.

Churches, mosques, and other sacred sites are often symbolically reimagined during nationalist

or religious conflicts as emblems of the enemy. Nationalist and religious have long

encouraged acts of destruction against sites of importance to rival nations or religions as stand-

ins for victories on the battlefield. Recent examples of deliberate architectural desecration

include Daesh’s obliteration of ancient temples at Palmyra and Shiite religious sites in and

around Mosul; ancient examples include the Roman empire’s sacking of the Second Temple in

Jerusalem.10 Moreover, acts of violence specifically targeting religious architecture occurred throughout the twentieth century across the former Yugoslavia. During the 1992-1995 Bosnian

War, eighteen mosques – several dating from the Ottoman occupation – were leveled by bulldozers in the Bosnian Serb capitol of Banja Luka in an effort to purge the urban landscape of any physical representations of the city’s Muslim minority.11 Across the Dinaric Alps, Bosnian

Muslim troops set fire to Orthodox Christian monasteries outside of Mostar while Croatian

forces deliberately obliterated that city’s spectacular sixteenth-century stone bridge.12 In

Sarajevo, the National Library of burned for three days along with

millions of unique historical manuscripts after being targeted by Serbian paramilitary troops.13

Similar acts of deliberate architectural destruction occurred throughout the Krajina and Slavonia

regions of during the 1991-1995 Croatian War of Independence.14

10 Andrew Curry, “Here Are the Ancient Sites ISIS has Damaged and Destroyed,” National Geographic, 1 September 2015; Ariela Pelaia, “The Great Revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple,” Learn Religions, 19 March 2019. 11 Stuart Kaufman, “Government Jingoism and the Fall of Yugoslavia,” Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2001), 165-201. 12 Kaufman, Ibid, 165-201; Robert Block and Christopher Bellamy, “Croats Destroy Mostar’s Historic Bridge,” The Independent, 10 November 1993. 13 Richard Ovenden, “ Mon Amour,” Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (London: John Murray, 2020), 153-168. 14 Sabrina Ramet, Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value, Transformation, Education, and Media (College Station: Texas A&M U P, 2007), 273. 13

In Kosovo itself, the destruction of the Kosovo War could be viewed as simply one chapter in a long saga of repeated actions targeting architectural heritage as an aspect of nationalism to be manipulated, disguised, or erased. Ottoman rulers destroyed or converted into mosques hundreds of churches throughout Kosovo during their five-hundred-year occupation of the region; upon their excision during World War I, numerous Ottoman homes, mosques, and administrative buildings were systemically burned by liberated populations.15 Synagogues,

Jewish cemeteries, and Serbian architectural heritage were later destroyed by Fascist-armed

Albanian security forces during World War II.16 And under Yugoslavia, the historic Ottoman bazaar in Priština (Prishtinë), the cultural centerpiece of the city’s Kosovar Albanian community, was leveled despite massive public outcry to make way for a reimagined brutalist city center.17

Kosovo’s history is filled with examples of architectural destruction connected with nationalist ideas of advancement and belonging. But while these historical traumas were certainly invoked by political leaders throughout the Kosovo War, they do not fully explain the unique scale of deliberate architectural destruction incurred during this latest conflict. Moreover, this timeline populated with examples of violence obscures long periods of regional stability and peace. The central question remains: why did this violent legacy replay yet again – and so much more devastatingly – during Yugoslavia’s dissolution? To answer such a question, we must first peel back several layers of dense Balkan geopolitical, demographic, and historical context. For while Kosovo has not experienced continual violence throughout the twentieth century, it has served as an ideological and symbolic battleground between nationalist narratives for centuries.

15 Bernd Jurgen Fischer, Albania at War 1939-1945 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue U P, 1999). 16 Ibid. 17 Andrew Herscher, “Counter-Heritage and Violence,” Future Anterior vol. 3 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006), 24-33. 14

Kosovo is a relatively small landlocked region in the central Balkans made up of two

fertile alpine plateaus bounded by the Dinaric Alps to the west and Šar (Sharr) Mountains to the

south. Since Roman times, the region has been famous as a crossroads for major trade routes and

for its abundant mineral resources: silver, lead, chrome, zinc, and lignite.18 While predominately

rural until the last fifty years, Kosovo’s population density is now among the highest in

Europe.19 Kosovar Albanians comprise the majority of Kosovo’s population today, over 90% of

the country’s 1,782,115 people (see Appendix B, figures 1-2).20 While Serb boycotts of the

Kosovar government’s census reports render official demographic data unreliable, Serbs are

generally accepted to make up around 5% of the population.21 The remainder of Kosovo’s

population consists of Romani, Ashkali, Turkish, Bosnian Muslim, and Gorani minority

communities.22

Theorized to be descended from the Illyrian tribes which populated the Adriatic Coast in

antiquity, Albanians are not closely ethnically related to their Balkan neighbors and speak a

language isolate that for centuries was one of Europe’s last unwritten vernaculars.23 Serbs,

meanwhile, are a Slavic people whose ancestors migrated south into the Balkans during the sixth

and seventh centuries.24 The vast majority of Kosovar Albanians are Sunni Muslim, but unlike

Serbs, for whom religious identity and are inextricably linked, some practice

Roman Catholicism, Bektashi Sufism, or Orthodox Christianity.25 Albanian national identity has,

18 Frances Trix, “Kosovo: From Resisting Expulsion to Building Independence,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Sabrina P Ramet and Christine Hassenstab (New York: Cambridge U P, 2019), 400. 19 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 400. 20 Agjencia e Statistikave të Kosovës, Vlerësim: Popullsia e Kosovës 2019 [Census: Populations of Kosovo 2019], Republic of Kosovo (Priština: Kosovo Agency of Statistics, 2020). 21 Agjencia e Statistikave të Kosovës, Vlerësim: Popullsia e Kosovës 2011 [Census: Populations of Kosovo 2011], Republic of Kosovo (Priština: Kosovo Agency of Statistics, 2013). 22 Ibid. 23 Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912 (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1967). 24 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 400. 25 Noah Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Pan Books, 1998), 22-40. 15

since the late nineteenth century, been predominately defined by usage of the Albanian language

rather than adherence to a particular religious creed.26 Serbs, on the other hand, differentiate their

national identity from that of their Bosnian and Croatian linguistic brothers predominately

through their adherence to the Serbian Orthodox faith.27

Kosovo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in Europe, with the city of

Prizren (Prizren) having been populated since approximately 10,000 BCE.28 Ancient Kosovo

traded hands between numerous empires and short-lived kingdoms making historical

demographics all but impossible to determine, but by the time Slavic migrations reached the

region around 1000 CE, local populations were likely a diverse array of Latinate peoples under

Byzantine cultural and political influence.29 Although the “Serbs” were initially a collection of loosely organized Slavic tribes, a new dynasty founded by Stefan Nemanja in the 1160s quickly consolidated these disparate groups into a cohesive Serbian military and religious apparatus.30

The Nemanjić Dynasty converted the Serbs to Orthodox Christianity, closely allied itself to the

Byzantine Empire, and began constructing royal churches and monasteries throughout Kosovo –

a region central to the new kingdom geographically as well as economically.31 Although both

short-lived and plagued by infighting, the notion of Nemanjić Dynasty as central to the Serbian

nation’s creation has been preserved and promoted by the , “which as a

national institution was essentially that dynasty’s creation.”32

26 Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912; Benjamin Kinney Harris, “The Creation of Albanianism: Carefully Constructed Roles of Symbols, Language, and Mythology in the Development of , 1850-1912,” Senior Thesis, Middlebury College Department of History, Middlebury, VT, 2015. 27 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 17. 28 Edi Shukriu, “Spirals of the Prehistoric Open Rock Painting from Kosova,” International Journal for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences vol. 35 (Lisbon: International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, 2006). 29 Malcolm, Kosovo, 22-40. 30 Judah, “An Empire on Earth,” The Serbs, Third Edition, 17-28. 31 Ibid, 17-28. 32 Ibid, 17. 16

On 15 June 1389, the Nemanjić Dynasty met its symbolic demise at Kosovo Polje (Fusha

e Kosovës), where tens of thousands of Ottoman Turks met a coalition of Balkan Christian forces

in a tactically inconclusive battle with immense casualties on both sides. Both the Nemanjić

Dynasty’s Prince Lazar and Ottoman Sultan died alongside the majority of their troops

in the chaos.33 While the Battle of Kosovo did not immediately result in the subjugation of all

Serbs to Ottoman rule, this event has come to signify the great defeat of the Serbs and the

beginning of five hundred years living under “the Ottoman Yoke.”34 Epic poetry and songs

narrating the epic battle proliferated throughout the Ottoman Balkans in subsequent centuries,

and the battle’s example of numerous Balkan kingdoms uniting together against a foreign threat

became a massively important symbol within multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. Prince Lazar’s death, in

particular, has come to symbolize an act of martyrdom on behalf of the Serbian Church and

nation.35

As the consolidated their power over Kosovo in the subsequent decades,

a vast number of the region’s Serbian population fled north into Bosnia and the Morava Valley to

escape subjugation to the Muslim power.36 The Ottomans would rule Kosovo from 1389 to 1912,

during which time Kosovo’s demographics came to represent the Caliphate’s diversity. Romani

people, Sephardic Jews, and Turks all settled in the region’s urban centers, while rural lands

vacated by Serbs became home to a Kosovar Albanian majority.37 Although Albanians had previously been Catholic or Orthodox Christian, even fighting alongside Prince Lazar in the

Battle of Kosovo, in the centuries following this defeat most steadily abandoned their Christian

33 Čedomir Antić, The History of Serbia (Belgrade: Laguna Publishing, 2018), 83. 34 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 31; Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804-2011, Updated Edition (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), 11. 35 Antić, The History of Serbia; Judah, “It is Better to Die in Battle than to Live in Shame,” The Serbs, Third Edition, 29-47; Anne Pennington and Peter Levi, Marko the Prince: Serbo-Croat Heroic Songs (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 17. 36 Antić, Ibid. 37 Malcolm, Kosovo, 22-40. 17

creed in favor of Islam. This massive societal conversion was not forced upon the Albanian

populace but rather represented a trend of individual conversions that spread among Kosovar

Albanian family units throughout the region.38 Historians have long debated why so few Kosovar

Albanians retained their allegiance to Christianity compared to most of their Balkan peers (and

even Albanians from Albania proper who converted at significantly lower rates), yet neither the

scholarly nor Albanian communities widely accept any single conclusion. Certainly, though,

Muslims received substantial benefits in the Ottoman sociopolitical system, leading to broad

integration of Albanian involvement in Ottoman politics and economics. These privileges

enjoyed by Albanian converts during the Ottoman occupation led Kosovar Serbs, who

maintained their Orthodox Christian identity and autonomy under the Ottoman millet system, to

largely equate them with the resented Turks as imperial tyrants.39

Facing the Caliphate’s imminent collapse, Albanian delegates from four different vilayets gathered in Prizren in 1878 to establish the League of Prizren with the goal of safeguarding

Albanian autonomy against Slavic and Greek encroachment and the corrupt Ottoman political apparatus.40 This organization, comprised of both Muslim and Christian Albanians, heralded a

new Albanian national consciousness.41 Thus, while Kosovo is seen as “the cradle of the Serbs,”

it is also cited by Albanians as the site of their sociopolitical self-realization.42

As part of the Peace Conference’s geopolitical dissection of the defeated Ottoman

Empire in 1919, the liberated Kosovo vilayet was awarded to the newly formed Kingdom of

38 Stavro Skendi, “Religion in Albania During the Ottoman Rule,” Südost-Forschungen vol. 15 (Regensburg: Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, 1956), 311-327. 39 Antić, The History of Serbia; The Ottoman Sultanate divided their vast empire into law-making and tax-paying units of a single religious profession called millets (milet, milet). Under this system, Serbs were part of a Serbian Orthodox millet while Albanians were part of a Muslim millet and theoretically politically indistinct from the ruling Turks. 40 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 401; a vilayet (vilajet; vilajeti) was an upper-level Ottoman administrative unit. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 18

Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.43 Fears that the Kosovar Albanian population would attempt to

disrupt the Slavic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed the Kingdom of

Yugoslavia, led leaders to split the region into three administrative banovinas, thus preventing a

Kosovar Albanian majority in any jurisdiction (see Appendix B, figures 3-4).44 When fascists

took over Yugoslavia in World War II, fascist leadership surmised that they could win over

Kosovar Albanians as loyal allies by uniting Kosovo with neighboring Albania. While occupied

Kosovar Albanians rebelled against this occupation at a similar rate to occupied Serbs, the association of Albanians with remained among many Serbs because of the Albanian nation’s official status as an Italian protectorate.45 This Albanian puppet government oversaw the

burning of Serbian villages throughout Kosovo in an effort to purify the national landscape.46

When World War II ended with Yugoslavia regaining independence as a socialist state,

Serbia effectively controlled Kosovo’s politics and economy despite the population remaining around 80% Kosovar Albanian.47 Yugoslavia was a diverse, multi-national state, but its entire

cult of symbology was based on pan-Slavism; since Kosovar Albanians weren’t Slavs, they were

de facto excluded from numerous sociopolitical power dynamics.48 Albanians faced the highest

rates of incarceration in Yugoslavia, the highest rates of poverty, and the highest rates of

illiteracy.49 Under dictator (hereafter, Tito), the Yugoslav government worked

towards erecting a concrete utopia – literally constructing a new socialist interpretation of

nationalism through standardized brutalist urban landscapes – that disproportionately bulldozed

43 Ibid. 44 Malcolm, Kosovo; banovinas (banovine; banovinë) were administrative units used during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, named after rivers in an attempt to deter nationalist affiliations. 45 Fischer, Albania at War 1939-1945. 46 Ibid. 47 Malcolm, Kosovo. 48 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Palo Alto: Stanford U P, 1998). 49 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 401. 19

and displaced Kosovar Albanian neighborhoods.50 These policies of exclusion led more than

100,000 Kosovar Albanians to emigrate from the region to between 1946 and 1966.51

While official anti-Albanian policies ended with Kosovo being afforded increased autonomous

status in 1968 and 1974, the region remained deeply impoverished and politically troubled.52

These layers of historical context are crucial to our understanding of the Kosovo War

because they were invoked continuously by nationalist movements at play during this later

period. A common joke among Kosovar Serbs today is that they have more war trauma from the

Battle of Kosovo in 1389 than from the war twenty years ago.53 The destruction of the Priština

Bazaar by Tito’s brutalist architectural agenda was continuously cited as the direct provocation

in multiple acts of architectural violence in 2004 – forty years later.54 While this thesis will focus on events taking place in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, it is impossible to disconnect this history from the aforementioned context. Nevertheless, the ascension of Serbian nationalist

Slobodan Milošević to political power and the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) coalescence in opposition to his chauvinist rhetoric demonstrate a clear turning point separating how nationalist narratives were promoted between the 1980s and previous decades.

Both Milošević and the KLA specifically called for the destruction of religious architecture of the other, invoking historical traumas, citing proof of their exclusive right to control Kosovo, and stoking fears of their nation’s extermination should they not strike first and hardest. Serbs came to see Kosovo as the birthplace of their Church, their nation; the site of their people’s martyrdom to the Ottoman horde and the promised land from which they were expelled.

50 Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 30. 51 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 401. 52 Ibid. 53 Luka Mihajlović, zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris, 11 February 2021. 54 Herscher, Violence Taking Place. 20

Kosovar Albanians increasingly viewed themselves as secondhand citizens on lands they had primarily lived upon and cultivated for hundreds of years under Ottoman and Yugoslav oppression; they too came to view Kosovo as crucial to their national histories and ambitions.

For both nations, churches and mosques became symbolic stand-ins for historical narratives that needed to be alternately glorified or erased. This resulted in systemic attempts towards the purification of the landscape through destruction of the opposing religion’s architecture and sacred spaces, an acted out through architectural demolition. This thesis intends to explain how such nationalist narratives proved so successful at reframing architecture as emblems of oppression and trauma requiring destruction.

21

Nationalist Theory: A Brief Overview

Since the eighteenth century, numerous political theorists have submitted competing

definitions for nationalism reflective of an impassioned debate concerning nationalism’s origins

and importance in human socio-politics. As delineated by political scientist Umut Özkırımlı’s

Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, three schools of thought have dominated these

conversations in recent decades: primordialism, modernism, and ethnosymbolism.55 While each

of these schools may be further fragmented into more complicated theoretical taxonomies, their

adherents generally share core qualities of what defines a nation and, therefore, how nationalism

must be academically understood. Effective conclusions about the nature, causes, and effects of

nationalism in Kosovo require adherence to one of these theoretical models.

Primordialism, as typified most outspokenly by sociologists Pierre van den Berghe and

Edward Shils, supposes that ethnic groups share an inherent bond tied to blood, language, and

religion.56 Crucially, this theory validates the beliefs generally held by nationalists themselves.

Primordialist scholars generally propose that endogamy is natural, that conflict between nations is inevitable, and that nations are a fundamental feature of human society that may be traced

throughout recorded history. According to van den Berghe, “ethnic groups may occasionally

enter into a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, but this is usually short-lived: relations

between different groups are most often antagonistic.”57 Thus, the breakup of Yugoslavia and

55 Umut Özkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, Third Edition (London: Palgrave, 2017). 56 Pierre van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987); Edward Shils, “Nation, Nationality, Nationalism, and Civil Society,” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 1, no. 1 (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). 57 van den Berghe, “Race and Ethnicity: A Sociobiological Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies vol. 1, no. 4 (Abingdon-on- Thames, Routledge: 1978), 409. 22

inter-ethnic war in Kosovo may be seen as a tragic inevitability for which no political leader,

group, or agenda should be understood as responsible. The architectural destruction surveyed in

this thesis is, for primordialists, an organic result of irreconcilable national divisions over which political rhetoric and nationalist narratives have little to no effect; architectural destruction as a byproduct of inter-ethnic conflict is to be expected and has occurred since time immemorial.

Modernists, on the other hand, argue that nationalist violence like that observed in

Kosovo is rational and recent – usually the result of economic issues and always employed

through the manipulations of empowered individuals. John Breuilly, Paul Brass, and Benedict

Anderson propose that nations consist of “imagined communities” that must be taught; they are essentially arbitrary tools used by competing elites to generate mass support.58 These scholars

observed the violent breakup of Yugoslavia as the result of clear actions taken and rhetoric

espoused by nationalist politicians and media sources who convinced their constituents and

readers of emotional, deliberately constructed arguments. Their nationalist narratives baselessly

promoted concepts of national superiority, stoked fears of extermination, and recontextualized

forgotten traumas to feel raw and urgent. Perhaps most crucially, these narratives only succeeded

in capturing the public consciousness due to Yugoslavia’s economic woes and uncertain political

future. The burning of mosques and destruction of churches in Kosovo must therefore be

recognized as inherently political acts for which individuals can and must be held responsible.

Founded by political historian Anthony Smith and outlined in his book entitled National

Identity, the ethnosymbolist school of nationalist theory seeks to bridge the gap between the two

aforementioned perspectives.59 Ethnosymbolists stress that nationalism is part of a natural, larger

58 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, First Edition (: U of Chicago P, 1994); Paul R Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison, First Edition (New York: SAGE, 1991); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016). 59 Anthony D Smith, National Identity (Reno: U of Nevada P, 1991). 23 cycle of ethnic consciousness reaching back to antiquity that is often mass-led rather than purely manipulated by elites, but also that nationalism always includes some manipulation of pre- existing and already-important ethnic symbols towards specific ends. While collective culture arises organically from what Smith termed the ethnie to constrain the elites, elites nevertheless employ this collective culture to maintain their power. According to Smith, “if three preconditions – hostile myths, ethnic fears, and opportunity – are present,” ethnic war will result after triggering events activate chauvinistic mobilization.60 These preconditions may be inflated and inflamed by nationalist politics or media culture, but they may never be invented. Thus, nationalist violence in Kosovo must have its basis both in a long history of opposing realities for

Kosovar Serbs and Albanians and in the speeches, decisions, and actions of national leaders.

In Modern Hatreds, British political scientist Stuart Kaufman analyzes four case studies using Smith’s ethnosymbolist causality framework for explaining the necessary preconditions of ethnic war provoked by nationalist hostility. According to Kaufman, this sequence of causally ordered triggering events can be either mass-led or elite-led in nature. In elite-led ethno- nationalist escalations, “a few powerful elites, typically government officials, [deliberately] harness ethnic myths and symbols to provoke fear, hostility, and a security dilemma” that need not have been actively recognized by the populace previously.61 If, however, “myths, fears, and hostility are already strong… a mass-led ethnic movement [may] emerge,” wherein preexisting and readily understood hostility constructs are merely reasserted organically – often following a traumatic social, political, or economic event.62

60 Stuart Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2001), 34. 61 Ibid, 34. 62 Ibid, 34. 24

Kaufman's research applies Smith’s definitions to the investigation of four Eastern

European conflicts that transpired during the 1990s. His comparison differs from much

nationalist scholarship by focusing primarily on the short-term causes of ethnic violence,

emphasizing the actions and speeches of political actors rather than tracing long nationalist

histories preceding outbursts of conflict. Kaufman claims that nationalist hysteria is deliberately

incited by political leaders through the manipulation of symbols with preexisting linkages to

emotionally evocative national narratives and mythologies. In the case of Kosovo, he suggests

that “most of the nationalist hysteria in Serbia was the result of symbol manipulation by

Milošević” but also emphasizes that these symbols have existed as core to Serbian national

identity for much longer, only being re-deployed rather than invented.63 Kaufman argues that

because symbols associated with threats to ethnic extinction are rooted in emotion rather than

rationality, successful peacekeeping efforts in nationalist conflicts must incorporate an

appreciation of the power of the symbols implicated in the nationalist behavior. This

understanding of the symbolic dimension undergirding mass-led nationalist movements and

elite-led nationalist movements, from the first impassioned invocations of nationalist fervor to

the first gunshots, perfectly encapsulates what drives violence against religious architecture – the

signifying domain of which operates primarily on the symbolic level.

Kaufman describes the escalation of nationalist tensions to militarized conflict in Kosovo

(and the entire former Yugoslavia) as a causally ordered sequence wherein key events deploying nationalist rhetoric directly provoked subsequent events applying the same rhetoric to increasingly violent ends. Furthermore, Kaufman argues that the conflict in Kosovo was incited by elite-led ethno-nationalist “symbol manipulation by [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milošević, his

63 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 198. 25

proxies, and the media he controlled.”64 While “nationalist political pressures in Serbia were

real, and a chauvinist national mythology was deeply rooted” far prior to Milošević’s rise to

power, Milošević and the KLA, both “chose to pursue policies so unyielding that the inevitable

result was confrontation.”65 Kaufman asserts that the Kosovo War “vividly illustrates the value

of the symbolic politics approach to explaining ethnic war” because it makes sense “only in the

context of the [pre-existing] nationalist myths and symbols that the peoples of Yugoslavia found

so moving.”66

While Kaufman’s causal argument and methodology for discussing the path to war in

Kosovo remains convincing, ethnosymbolist theorists of nationalist politics have faced a barrage of criticism in the last two decades. Primordialists tend to view all ethnic conflicts as being

primarily mass-led, emphasizing pre-existing, often ancient, symbols and narratives as necessary

preconditions for violence that can surge to the forefront between any two historically

antagonistic populations given an opportunity. These scholars discount Kaufman’s assertion of

the Kosovo conflict as elite-led by repeating his own admission that “nationalist political

pressures in Serbia were real, and a chauvinist national mythology was deeply rooted” far prior

to Milošević’s rise to power.67 For primordialists, Milošević primarily gained power from pre-

existing nationalist vitriol rather than lending his power to it. Modernists, on the other hand,

would challenge the theoretical assumption of pre-existing ethnic tensions, viewing these as

irrelevant until elites employ them as tools for scapegoating populations and explaining

perceived socio-economic ills. For modernists, any notion of inanimate symbols as being to

blame for ethnic violence removes responsibility from jingoistic political actors like Milošević

64 Ibid. 65 Kaufman,Modern Hatreds, 198. 66 Ibid, 199. 67 Ibid, 198. 26

and the KLA who should be considered entirely accountable for manipulating arbitrary narratives and symbols, the historical bases for which remain irrelevant to the resulting destruction.

Despite criticisms of ethnosymbolism as theoretically confused, due to its determination to prove nationalism simultaneously organic and constructed, this thesis will adhere to Anthony

Smith’s definitions of a nation and nationalism as well as the larger ethnosymbolist model for explaining inter-ethnic violence. Under this framework, Kosovo’s religious architecture may be studied as both symbolically representative of genuine historic divisions between Serbs and

Albanians as well as victim to political rhetoric and individual actors. This decision has been

influenced by two key factors. Adherence to modernist models of nationalist theory requires the

refutation of perceived historical traumas and proud narratives as constructions which must then

be traced to their constructors – and minimizing the reality of nationalist rhetoric too often

minimizes its very real, and in this case devastating, human impact. Conversely, entirely

presupposing the perpetuity of nationalism and inevitability of nationalist conflict through

primordialism too often falls into the trap of excusing inter-ethnic violence and chauvinist narratives rather than critically explaining them. With this in mind, this thesis assumes a nation to be “a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, [and] a mass, public culture.”68 Accordingly, nationalism should be understood henceforth as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation.”69

68 Smith, National Identity, 14. 69 Ibid, 73. 27

Methodology and Limitations

This thesis primarily employs a comparative historical analysis model to discuss the narratives invoked by both Serbian and Kosovar Albanian nationalist movements within Kosovo in the decades surrounding the armed conflict of 1998-9. The events discussed in this thesis reflect extremely recent, unfinished history and many of the nationalist narratives employed before and during the conflict remain widely accepted and repeatedly invoked today. However, my historical analysis approach to researching underlying narratives that served as an impetus to architectural destruction will, I believe, contribute unique perspective to the scholarly landscape.

Few historians have critically analyzed the Kosovo conflict and its aftermath due to its relative recentness, so by adopting this approach to examine existing literature and primary sources, I hope to add new conclusions to this evolving academic conversation. The historical analysis approach also permitted me to collect qualitative textual data from a range of sources to form, investigate, and critically analyze a hypothesis. Historical analysis encourages interdisciplinary inquiry, which has been crucial in accommodating my need to grapple with social, political, religious, anthropological, and architectural impetuses and impacts of nationalist conflict.

Comparative historical analysis has also allowed me to compare and contrast the actions and narratives of Serbian and Kosovar Albanian nationalist movements rather than assuming their polarity or equivalence. Furthermore, this approach affords opportunity to delve deeper into

Kosovar history to link recent events of architectural destruction with key symbolic events in the past: the Battle of Kosovo, the burning of Serbian villages by Kosovar Albanian fascists during

World War II, and the destruction of the historic Priština Bazaar by the Yugoslav government.

28

Such historical events and their effect on nationalist narratives long after their occurrence demonstrate the use of interpreting architectural destruction within a broader temporal context.

My research relies heavily upon speeches and news coverage demonstrating the inflammatory nationalist language that I argue as causal to the architectural destruction incurred throughout Kosovo. Within my broader historical analysis, I will draw from aspects of discourse analysis and ethnosymbolist frame analysis to demonstrate and qualify this causal relationship.

These approaches will permit my dissection of nationalist narratives to assert architecture as both weapon of and victim to such rhetoric.

Specifically, my research will emphasize the KLA leadership’s vocal advocacy of

Albanian nationalist narratives stressing territorial belonging in Kosovo, the League of Prizren as a symbol of Albanian cultural origins, and the continued national struggles of Kosovar Albanians for independence under both the Ottoman occupation and perceived Yugoslav oppression. For proponents of these narratives, the presence of Serbian orthodox churches, especially medieval churches, reflected the ambiguous status of cultural ownership over Kosovo as a territory.

Moreover, Serbian architecture came to directly undermine increasing rhetoric promoting

Kosovo as an ethnically homogenous territory. On the other hand, my research will highlight

Serbian nationalist narratives that stress the Battle of Kosovo and Patriarchate of Peć (Pejë) as birthplaces for the Serbian nation.70 For Serbs, Kosovar Albanians and their Ottoman-influenced, primarily Muslim architecture represent the Ottoman yoke, under which Serbs felt threatened with cultural extinction at the hands of an oppressive imperial power. Both Serbs and Kosovar

Albanians invoked sacred architecture as emblems of their belonging and their victimization by the other throughout the 1990s. My research methods call attention to many such speeches, to

70 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition. 29

incendiary texts such as the Memorandum on Yugoslavia’s Situation by the Serbian Academy of

Sciences and Arts (SANU), and to the beliefs of Serbian and Kosovar Albanian leaders and

citizens reflected in interviews, memoirs, and other documents.71

Ethnosymbolist nationalist frameworks, as mentioned previously, judge that nationalist conflict is driven by elites who utilize symbols – such as culturally significant architecture – as narrative tools to coopt power and incite existential fears in their national communities. Through

this frame analysis approach, I have grouped the qualitative findings from my comparative historical analysis into thematic categories that explain the relationship between nationalist socio-political study and the actual impacts experienced in Kosovo. As previously mentioned,

Anthony Smith argued that ethnic war stems from three preconditions: “hostile myths, ethnic fears, and opportunity.”72 Under my adapted ethnosymbolist nationalist framework, I specify the three key preconditions to architectural destruction along violent nationalist lines in Kosovo as: myths of supremacy, fears of extermination, and historical trauma. Each of my chapters analyzes

one of these preconditions and its weaponization of architecture as a symbol.

While my research approach encourages incisive qualitative analysis of nationalist

narratives promoted before, during, and after the Kosovo War, the approach is limited to merely

demonstrating and explaining how these narratives led to the unique scale of architectural

destruction inflicted upon the Kosovar landscape. This thesis does not seek to refute or critique

the logic or legitimacy behind either Kosovar Albanian or Serbian nationalist narratives. While

some nationalist sentiments and historical revisionism may be contradicted by my sources or

research findings, this must be understood as an inevitable side effect of nationalist study rather

than my goal. I cannot effectively analyze subject matter dealing with nationalist narratives

71 Меморандум САНУ [Memorandum SANU] (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1986). 72 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 34. 30

without contradicting certain nationalist perspectives, but I have attempted to rest my research upon objective facts without passing explicit judgment denouncing certain nationalist narratives

as nonsense. Indeed, the entire premise of this study is that nationalism is not nonsense – so long

as nationalist narratives are real for their adherents, they may inflict real damage.

Although it may be tempting for the reader to assign blame for the Kosovo conflict and ensuing architectural destruction predominately upon either the Serbs or the Kosovar Albanians, my comparative historical analysis relies on the assertion that narratives from both nations met the necessary preconditions for inciting violence – both architectural and otherwise. But this thesis is not concerned with quantifying fault; I do not make any judgements on the total value of the architectural destructions either incited or incurred by Serbs or Kosovar Albanians. The examples of architectural destruction invoked as data points here are all assumed to have unquantifiable importance. While my conclusions assign responsibility for certain actions upon certain actors, quantifying this responsibility is far beyond my scope. I have attempted to include a roughly equivalent number of examples of both nationalist rhetoric expressed and architectural destruction incurred by members of both nations, but this should not be adjudged as implying any equivalence.

Finally, while this thesis will not seek to singlehandedly answer whether or not Kosovo should be viewed as part of Serbia or as an independent state, this thesis will refer to Kosovo in its post-2008 context as a fully independent state in accordance with American diplomatic practice and the vast majority of Western academia. I acknowledge that this and other aforementioned decisions may offend some and feel frustratingly evasive to others, but both my methodology and personal academic interest are limited to scrutinizing nationalism rather than

31 challenging its legitimacy. I hope that this approach minimizes discomfort and offense for all readers.

Research Question and Hypothesis

Architectural destruction is often perceived as inevitable collateral damage during modern conflict, but a major facet of the Kosovo War and its aftermath was the deliberate targeting and demolition of architectural heritage on a massive scale. For both Serbs and

Kosovar Albanians, destroying the opposing nation’s architecture was central to a concentrated effort towards purifying the Kosovar cultural landscape and asserting ownership. While Serbian

Orthodox churches and Albanian mosques had together defined the region’s architectural landscape for centuries, nationalism transformed this coexistence into a bitter impossibility, fuel for anxieties about who belongs and who are merely illegitimate occupiers. But which relationships with chauvinist nationalist rhetoric enabled architecture to be so successfully manipulated as a sociopolitical symbol and narrative tool in Kosovo?

Though the architectural sites, historical narratives, and distinct national grievances surveyed in this study far predate the Kosovo War, I propose that only through a distinct process of escalatory rhetoric were these preexisting symbols weaponized. Collective traumas provided the opportunity for violent aggression to be repeatedly recontextualized as retaliatory justice for internalized victimhood, encouraging the deliberate infliction of further trauma upon the other.

This thesis intends primarily to answer how nationalist narratives of both Serbs and Kosovar

Albanians centered the sacred architecture of the opposing nation as targets of this violence.

Through analysis of key figures, events, and cases of architectural destruction, I argue that the nationalist narratives of these two nations transformed architecture into emblems representing myths of supremacy, fears of destruction, and historical trauma.

32

Chapter 1: Myths of Supremacy

Before the War:

The convoluted and tumultuous history of the Western Balkans has resulted in each of the region’s nations experiencing periods of repression and domination by others, as well as periods of relative power over their neighbors.73 In terms of nationalism, this complicated reality has led to competitive narratives of supreme victimhood that in turn assert a nation’s earned right to certain territories, powers, and privileges through generations of suffering, displacement, and national martyrdom. Serbs are not ashamed, but rather defiantly proud to have “been overrun, tortured, killed, and stolen from by the Turks, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, the Germans, Tito;” this long past filled with examples of persecution is submitted as proof of their present deservingness of greatness.74 Kosovar Albanians, meanwhile, stress that they have always constituted an overshadowed, oppressed, or occupied minority despite their longstanding demographic majority in Kosovo. While such narratives do not seem predisposed to endorse myths of supremacy, these histories of oppression have been interpreted by their respective nations as proof of a divine sacrifice endured for a future reward: unchallenged control of

Kosovo’s physical and cultural landscape. In the years preceding the eruption of the Kosovo

War, both Kosovar Albanian and Serbian leaders and media weaponized these myths of supremacy against the opposing nation’s architectural heritage, rejecting such cultural symbols as affronts to their perceived birthright.

73 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 177. 74 Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, Belgrade: Among the Serbs (Chicago: Ivan Dee Publishing, 1994), 15. 33

The Serbian myth of martyrdom centers around the Battle of Kosovo, where, according

to legend, the Serbian Prince Lazar chose to martyr himself and his army in order to join Serbia’s

fate to the empire of heaven.75 This choice not only resulted in Prince Lazar’s canonization as a

Serbian Orthodox saint but also the widespread sentiment expressed by a Serbian Orthodox

bishop over five hundred years later that “beside the name of Christ, no other name is more

beautiful or more sacred than ‘Kosovo.’”76 During the Ottoman occupation, stories, songs, and

epic poems about the Battle of Kosovo imbued Serbian national mythology with a glorious

irrationality: they “cast the Serbian people as... eternally victims and eternally sanctified by God

[and] defined the Serb ethos as that of defenders of the Orthodox Christian faith against the

oppressors, the Muslim Turks.”77 The Battle of Kosovo myth thus rationalizes a terrible practical

defeat through an assertion of moral victory and superiority.78

This ethical supremacy is further reinforced by the parallel tale of Vuk Branković which

frames Prince Lazar’s death at the Battle of Kosovo as the result of a treacherous deception by

one of his own trusted allies. While this storied betrayal has no basis in fact, it nevertheless

“represents another important strand in Serbian thinking: that Serbia is repeatedly the martyr

because it is repeatedly betrayed.”79 Such a perception has influenced a sentiment that Serbs cannot rely upon other nations – that allegiance is treacherous because no other nation is as trustworthy, as moral as the Serbs themselves. This is perceived as especially true of the

Albanian nation, which is seen by Serbian nationalists as uniquely traitorous for their abandonment of Christian faith to win favor with their Ottoman occupiers. When heavily

75 Pennington and Levi, Marko the Prince, 17. 76 Laura Silber and Allen Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, Revised Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 72. 77 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 171. 78 Ger Duijzings, “Religion and the Politics of ‘Albanianism’: Naim Frashëri’s Bektashi Writings,” Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), 68. 79 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 172. 34

Albanian-populated southern Serbia was liberated from Ottoman rule during the Russo-Ottoman

War (1877-1878), Albanian villages throughout the Preševo (Preshevë) Valley were burned due

to a general perception that including untrustworthy Albanians in an independent Serbia would

subvert, corrupt, and corrode the fledgling nation’s sociopolitical fabric.80 While the political

importance of the Kosovo mythos has varied across centuries and decades, its popular

significance cannot be overestimated. Indeed, the first constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs,

Croats, and Slovenes was purposefully proclaimed on the battle’s anniversary: a symbolic

gesture of victory against Ottoman rule.81

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Kosovar Albanians also sought to contend their

own supremacy, resurrecting historical evidence from their own murky past. First and foremost,

Kosovar Albanian nationalists asserted their nation’s descent from the ancient Illyrians because

this narrative proved their historical continuity in Kosovo and discounted claims from Serbs that

their presence was merely a remnant of the Ottoman occupation.82 By proving themselves the

original inhabitants of Kosovo, both nations sought to assert the supreme right to their territory.

But for Kosovar Albanians, their supposed ancient origin was also promoted in an effort to counter the relative youngness of the Albanian nationalist movement which coalesced nearly a century after that of the Serbs.

Kosovar Albanians also responded to the Prince Lazar mythos with their own saga of resistance against the Ottoman occupation: that of Gjergj Kastrioti , an Albanian

Catholic who led a briefly successful uprising against the Caliphate in the mid-1400s. According

80 Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Wars 1912-1913: An Unrecognized Genocide,” Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 25-44. 81 Victor Roudometof, “Toward an Archaeology of National Commemoration in the Balkans,” National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative, Eds. Michael E Geisler (Middlebury: Middlebury College P, 2005), 51. 82 Piro Misha, “Invention of a Nationalism: Myth and Amnesia,” Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), 42. 35

to Albanian historian Piro Misha, Skanderbeg became such a powerful national hero because he

embodied “the myth of ‘continuous resistance’ against their numerous foes over the centuries.”83

Despite the historical figure’s Christian faith, the mythical figure of Skanderbeg captured the

imagination of Kosovar Albanians because his martyrdom to the Ottoman horde paralleled

Prince Lazar’s and contradicted Serbian claims of exceptionalism. In 1994, Albanian classrooms

throughout Kosovo defiantly hung Skanderbeg’s portrait – a symbolic action that may have

foreshadowed the violent resistance to come; many KLA members later cited Skanderbeg’s

example as having influenced their decision to raise arms against the Serbian “occupiers.”84

Finally, both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians believe that they have been deceived and

betrayed by the other across history: in 1981, the Albanian Zëri i Popullit promoted a

popular legend that Tito had promised Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha that “Kosovo and other Albanian regions belong to Albania and we shall return them to you, but not now because the Great Serb reaction would not accept such a thing.”85 In 1989, when Serbian dictator

Slobodan Milošević stripped Kosovo of its autonomous status, Kosovar Albanians cited both

examples as proof of Serbian treachery.

Architecture in Kosovo is inextricably linked to these myths of supremacy because

historic structures serve as physical links tying present-day nations to their glorious pasts.

Kosovo’s medieval Serbian Orthodox churches, erected during the age of the sanctified

Nemanjić Dynasty, bring the Battle of Kosovo with all of its revered characters to life – they are

seen as living monuments imbued with the spirit of the Serbian nation and ghosts of its

perseverance. Their improbable survival across centuries of Ottoman rule and tumultuous change

83 Ibid, 43. 84 Denisa Kostovicova, “Shkolla Shqipe and Nationhood: Albanians in Pursuit of Education in the Native Language in Interwar and Post-Autonomy Kosovo,” Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), 168. 85 Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London: IB Tauris, 1995), 165, citing Zëri i Popullit, 17 May 1981. 36

is seen to parallel the survival of the Serbian nation itself, affirming the nation as one blessed by

God. Albanians also take immense pride in their architectural heritage, seeing their medieval

stone kullas, ornate mosques, and vibrant bazaars as living spaces within which beat the heart of

their culture.86 While Serbs tend to associate Ottoman architecture with the Turkish occupiers,

Albanians recognize it as their own: their craftsmen plastered and painted the Sufi tekkes; their

ancestors plied crafts and wares along the cobbled streets of the bazaars; their families have

owned and carefully maintained the stone kullas which dot the rural landscape.87 Unfortunately, blurred associations between historic Albanian architecture and that of the Ottoman Caliphate largely discouraged the protection and valuing of such sites by Serbs. Throughout the twentieth century, numerous Albanian neighborhoods and historic sites were bulldozed and replaced by

Yugoslav governments (both the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Socialist Yugoslavia) in the name of progress while Serbian architecture received historic designations and restoration funds. By

1990, 210 Serbian Orthodox sites across Kosovo were designated as cultural monuments; only

15 Kosovar Albanian religious sites received such protection.88 Serbian exceptionalism thus

excused acts of architectural destruction perpetrated against the other even while demolition of

their own heritage was to be forcefully decried.

Under the administration of Yugoslav dictator Tito, Kosovar Albanians faced endemic

poverty at levels far beyond Slavic national groups as well as cultural isolation due to their non-

Slavic identity. Excluded from the secular pan-Slavic symbologies and economic benefits of

86 Kullas or ‘tower houses’ (kule; kullasa) are generally two- or three-story stone constructions erected throughout the Balkans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This style of architecture was generally reserved for wealthier Muslim families. 87 Tekkes (tekije; teqetë) are sites of worship, meditation, learning, and communal gathering used by Kosovo’s Bektashi Sufi population. Sufis are a Muslim sect that practice spiritual Islam outside the confines of mainstream Sunni Islam – their religion is defined largely by the notion that all adherents have a personal relationship with God. Sufis historically constituted a significant portion of the Kosovar Albanian population and Sufi sites remain extremely culturally important to most Kosovar Albanians. 88 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 408; Andrew Herscher and András Riedlmayer, “Monument and Crime: The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo,” Grey Room, no. 1 (Autumn 2000), 110. 37

Yugoslav socialism, Kosovar Albanians instead looked to previous leadership for cultural

inspiration: that of the nineteenth century League of Prizren which advocated for a united

Greater Albania connecting Albanian-majority lands throughout the Western Balkans. This

concept of a directly parallels Serbian nationalist desires to establish a Greater

Serbia. Both concepts for mono-national super states are predicated on which

advocates for the occupation and reclamation of lost territories based on perceived cultural

ownership – an inherently supremacist political philosophy.

While Serbs living under Tito widely bought into the socialist artistic, cultural, and

literary trends promoted in pursuit of a new Yugoslav multinational identity, Albanians – largely

excluded from the educational system and Yugoslav civic life altogether despite the expressed

socialist commitment to “” among nations – never bought into these new

identifiers.89 The educational curriculum of Yugoslavia, in particular, “was tailored to promote the common identity of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes... yet what for Serbs comprised a policy of

integration, for Albanians proved a policy of denationalization.”90 It is no wonder, then, that

Tito’s attempts to transform Kosovo’s urban landscapes in parallel with these new cultural

markers of met widespread opposition from Kosovar Albanians never indoctrinated

into the mentality they heralded. Serbian notions of superiority also pervaded Yugoslav

administrative politics: not only was Kosovo a politically subservient autonomous territory rather

than a full republic due to general distrust of Kosovar Albanians, but Albanians were officially

labeled under Yugoslav law as a nationality (Serbian: nacionalnost) rather than a nation

(Serbian: narod) like, for example, Serbs or Croats.91 This designation “withheld from Albanians

89 Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. 90 Kostovicova, “Shkolla Shqipe and Nationhood,” Albanian Identities, Eds. Schwandner-Sievers and Fischer, 158. 91 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 153. 38

the right to self-determination,” and was predicated on the argument that minority nationalities,

like Albanians and Hungarians, “did not have this right because... they had a mother state outside

the borders of Yugoslavia.”92 Minimizing Kosovar Albanians in this way encouraged their

political exclusion but also symbolically implied a lack of Albanian belonging within the

Yugoslav socio-cultural apparatus; for Kosovar Albanians, their official mother state was not

Yugoslavia itself, but rather Albania.

Beginning in 1968, urban Kosovar Albanians engaged in repeated, sustained protesting

against Yugoslav architectural projects – most of which constituted large-scale public works projects directly associated with the socialist administration. Between 1968 and Slobodan

Milošević’s ascension to power in 1989, over 1,200 acts of vandalism were recorded in Priština; more than four-fifths of these were directed at buildings associated with the Serb-dominated

Yugoslav state apparatus which represented their sociopolitical exclusion: police stations,

administrative buildings, and the University of Priština.93 During a wave of 1981 protests demanding that Kosovo become a republic with equal status to Serbia within Yugoslavia, these clashes with Serb-associated administrative architecture expanded to include Serbian religious architecture. On 16 March 1981, Kosovar Albanian protesters set fire to the medieval Patriarchal

Monastery of Peć, destroying historic monastic living quarters and a collection of priceless liturgical books and icons (see Appendix C, Figure 1).94 This attack, a clear foreshadowing of the

organized architectural violence to come during the Milošević era, must be viewed as a response

to Yugoslav exclusionary policies and practices that painted Kosovar Albanians as inferior.

92 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 153. 93 Herscher, Violence Taking Place. 94 Marvine Howe, “Sacred Serbian Site Damaged by Blaze,” The New York Times, 21 April 1981. 39

While rising to power through the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution of populist

protests in the late 1980s, Slobodan Milošević dialed up Serbian nationalist rhetoric, promoting

Serbian myths of supremacy through speeches and policies to galvanize his supporters. Indeed,

Stuart Kaufman observes that “after 1986, virtually all of the violence in Serbia was either

organized by Milošević’s machine or aimed against his chauvinist policies.”95 Milošević, his

proxies, and the media he controlled not only invoked symbols from the medieval Battle of

Kosovo, but increasingly framed the contemporary demographic situation in Kosovo as a

reprisal. In 1988, he told a crowd of supporters in Belgrade that Serbs “shall win the battle for

Kosovo regardless of the obstacles facing us inside and outside the country. We shall win despite

the fact that Serbia’s enemies outside the country are plotting against it, along with those in the

country.”96 This rhetoric framed the Serbian nation’s imperative to, once again, prove its

superiority and faith despite being outnumbered and likely doomed to fail; Serbian demographic

supremacy in Kosovo, for Milošević and his supporters, was a righteous destiny.

On the Battle of Kosovo’s six-hundredth anniversary, Slobodan Milošević infamously

addressed around one million supporters before the Memorial at Kosovo Polje.97 For

months prior, Milošević had publicized the event by touring the sacred relics of Prince Lazar

himself around Serb-inhabited parts of Yugoslavia.98 Surrounded by resuscitated symbols of

Serbian nationalism outlawed under Tito – peonies representing the blood of Prince Lazar, the

Serbian royal eagle, and the slogan “Only Unity Saves the Serbs” – Milošević declared to a

cheering crowd waving his photographs beside icons of Prince Lazar:

95 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 198. 96 Sabrina P Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, Second Edition (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1992), 229. 97 Antić, The History of Serbia, 276. 98 Milan Milošević, “The Media Wars: 1987 – 1997,” in Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, Eds. Jasminka Udovički and James Ridgeway (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke U P, 2000), 110. 40

“Six centuries later, now, we are being again engaged in battles and are facing battles. They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet... Six centuries ago, Serbia heroically defended itself at Kosovo Polje, but it also defended Europe. Serbia was at that time the bastion that defended European culture, religion, and European society in general.”99

This passage of the speech framed the Serbian nation as a defender of European Christendom and implied the non-Europeanness of Albanian Muslims, the clear current opponents of

Milošević’s perceived battles. The speech also rhetorically glorified Milošević as a contemporary

Prince Lazar, a thematic construct not lost on the Serbian press who dubbed the president “Little

Lazar.”100 The following day, Belgrade newspaper asserted, “we are once more living in the times of Kosovo... they want to take away from us the Serbian and the Yugoslav Kosovo... but they will not be allowed to.”101 Serbian poet Matija Bećković echoed such nationalist sentiments, referring to Milošević’s speech as “the culmination of the Serbian national revolt” and proof that “there is so much Serbian blood and Serbian sanctity there that Kosovo will remain Serbian even if there is not a single Serb left.”102

The Gazimestan address effectively rendered the Serbian nationalist aspiration for a

Greater Serbia as official Yugoslav policy, alarming other national groups throughout the multiethnic union and terrifying Kosovar Albanians in particular. In the wake of the speech,

Milošević backed his divisive rhetoric with political action, revoking Kosovo’s autonomous status, bulldozing historic Kosovar Albanian architecture to clear space for the erection of

Serbian Orthodox churches, and removing virtually all Kosovar Albanians from state employment. Alongside these efforts, Milošević weaponized his state-controlled media “to further an atmosphere of resentment, hatred, and fear among Serbs by constantly identifying

99 Slobodan Milošević, “Говор на Газиместану [],” Kosovo Polje, 28 June 1989. 100 Louis Sell, Slobodan Milošević and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke U P, 2002), 88. 101 Politika, “Специјални Додац о Говору на Газиместану [Special Feature on the Gazimestan Speech],” 29 June 1989. 102 Vidosav Stefanović, Milošević: The People’s Tyrant (London: IB Tauris, 2004), 219. 41

Muslim Albanians with the old Turkish threat as the vanguard of a new Islamic menace to

Serbs.”103 In response, Kosovar Albanian politicians stripped from their cabinet positions founded the Democratic League of Kosovo and began directly advocating for the creation of a

Greater Albania, boycotting Yugoslav institutions and self-publishing their own divisive propaganda. During the mid-1990s, the KLA also began to coalesce, launching escalatory attacks on Serbian targets. Among the first victims of KLA attacks were Serbian Orthodox churches, cemeteries, and church construction zones; such sites were regularly defaced with graffiti dehumanizing Serbs as “pigs,” “rats,” and “dogs.”104

During the War:

In early 1998, the conflict between narratives advocating for and Greater

Albania exploded into a conflict that forever reshaped Kosovo’s cultural landscape. During the

Kosovo War, as later affirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

(ICTY), architecture was not merely collateral damage bur rather victim to systematic, direct attacks for its role as a .105 Both Milošević’s military leadership and the KLA saw the sacred architecture of the opposing nation as representing an illegal occupier they needed to overthrow. Serbian myths of supremacy had redefined Albanian architectural heritage as remnants of the Ottoman occupation which must be obliterated as a patriotic and religious duty, invoking the memory of Prince Lazar. Albanian architecture itself had further come to symbolize non-Europeanness, directly challenging the popular Serbian vision of itself as a European country. The towering white minarets rising above villages throughout Kosovo were not only

103 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 180. 104 Herscher, Violence Taking Place. 105 Weizman and Herscher, “Conversation,” Future Anterior, vol. 8, no. 1, 111. 42

seen as eyesores by Serbian soldiers, police, and paramilitaries – they were physical reminders of

the perceived defeat at the Battle of Kosovo and five-hundred years of subsequent Ottoman

subjugation.106 For Albanians, Serbian architecture had similarly come to symbolize self-

righteous oppression – physical reminders of their own secondary status within a country over

which they had no cultural or political ownership.

The Geneva Convention prohibits military destruction of movable and immovable

property “except when such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary for military

operations.”107 In Kosovo, Serbian violence against architecture reflected the “coordinated and

systematic campaign to terrorize, kill, and expel Albanians, organized by the highest level of the

Serb government at the time;” it too was coordinated and systemic.108 Multiple sources have

determined that half of Kosovo’s 500 mosques were directly attacked, including the fifteenth-

century Bajrakli in Peć – one of the few Albanian Muslim sites recognized by the

Yugoslav government as a cultural monument (see Appendix C, Figure 2-3).109 Serbian military

troops of set this mosque on fire, destroying unique Ottoman wall art, at the direct orders of

Milošević as later determined by the ICTY.110 In fact, every Islamic monument in the entire

district of Peć was systemically destroyed by the Serbian military under his direction.111

Milošević’s trial by the ICTY also found that Serbian soldiers engaged in the “decapitation” of

minarets as a game during the conflict.112

106 While the military efforts carried out under Slobodon Milošević’s direction in Kosovo were officially organized by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia rather than an independent Serbia, this thesis refers to “Serbian soldiers” and the “Serbian military” due to the fact that forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were nearly exclusively Serbian by national identification and to avoid confusion with the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbian paramilitaries, on the other hand, were groups of varying levels of organization formed by Kosovar Serb citizens who participated in violence against Kosovar Albanian communities. 107 Hirad Abtahi, “The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict: The Practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 2001). 108 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 406. 109 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 408. 110 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Trial of Slobodan Milošević, The Hague, 13 February 2002. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 43

Many of these sites were targeted specifically for their symbolic importance to Kosovar

Albanians: in March 1999, Serbian police obliterated the League of Prizren building, the

birthplace of Albanian nationalism, with rocket-propelled grenades (see Appendix C, Figure

4).113 Over 90% of the traditional stone kullas that represented Kosovar Albanians’ rich heritage

as middle-class merchants and landowners during Ottoman rule were also deliberately

destroyed.114 And in seeking to codify and perpetuate their supremacy, Serbian military groups

at Milošević’s direction deliberately incinerated Albanian libraries and archives that were seen as

holding the potential to contradict their narratives.115 The Kosovo Public Library network’s

combined losses were assessed at over 900,588 volumes.116 Thousands of singular documents

representing centuries of Ottoman administrative records were among the losses, burnt to ashes

inside the Islamic Archives of Kosovo by Serbian police immediately after the armistice

agreement and hours before NATO peacekeeping troops arrived (see Appendix C, Figure 5).117

Efforts to systemically erase Kosovar Albanian records that could contradict Serbian narratives of dominance and hegemony echoed Milošević’s tight control of the Serbian media which made criticism of his nationalist rhetoric all but impossible during the conflict.118 They

also represent a clear result of Milošević’s chauvinist rhetoric which manipulated the symbol of

Kosovo “using themes of martyrdom, betrayal, and moral worth to turn the battle story into a metaphor [for] all contemporary Serbs, while appropriating for himself the mantle of the sainted

113 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Second Edition (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 85. 114 Ibid. 115 András Riedlmayer, “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace: Destruction of Libraries During and After the Balkan Wars of the 1990s,” Library Trends vol. 56, no. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 2007), 124. 116 Carsten Frederiksen and Frode Bakken, Libraries in Kosova/Kosovo: A General Assessment and a Short and Medium-Term Development Plan (Copenhagen: International Federation of Library Association and Institutions, 2000), 34. 117 Riedlmayer, “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace,” Library Trends vol. 56, no. 1, 124; the lines between Serbian military (officially the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and Serbian police serving under the Public Security Department in Serbia for Kosovo during the Kosovo War are blurred because the region was officially under varying degrees of martial law throughout the 1990s. The Serbian police may therefore be understood in the context of the Kosovo War as effectively an alternative branch of the Serbian armed forces; as such, Serbian police leadership has been tried for war crimes by the ICTY. 118 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 327. 44

Lazar.”119 These nationalist narratives of martyrdom, indeed, explain Milošević’s decision to continue engaging in the Kosovo conflict despite explicit threats of retaliation by NATO: he calculated that even in sacrificing his country’s political future through ostracization from

Western democracy he could “salvage his reputation as the Serb who lost everything by becoming a new Lazar – the Serb who fought for a just but doomed cause.”120

Some historians have cited the KLA as the “most successful guerilla organization in

modern history” due to its fulfillment of all major objectives within nineteen months of its first

public appearance.121 While initially composed of small cells drawn from disenfranchised rural

populations of Kosovar Albanians, the KLA rapidly amassed young Albanian support following

the assassination of member Adem Jashari – along with 57 extended family members – in a

massive shootout at Prekaz (Prekaz) in March 1998.122 The KLA’s supporters were tired of

Kosovar Albanian political leader Ibrahim Rugova’s passive resistance and instead subscribed to

KLA recruitment materials advocating that they “must forcibly drive out all emblems of

Serbianness” to ensure freedom.123 This policy manifested itself through not only the ethnic

cleansing of Serb-populated areas, but also attacks on Serbian architecture. During a campaign

targeting Serbian villages around the town of Orahovac (Rahovec) in July 1998, the KLA

bombarded the fourteenth-century Zočište Monastery for forty-five minutes with heavy artillery

despite the structure having no strategic importance (see Appendix C, figures 6-7).124 After the

conflict, the ruined monastery was completely destroyed by dynamite in September 1999, three

119 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 199. 120 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 324. 121 Ibid, 317. 122 Glenny, The Balkans, Updated Edition, 654. 123 Fatos Hoxha (former KLA member), zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris, 28 February 2021. 124 Heike Krieger, The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109. 45 months after the armistice purported to have ended the conflict.125 Similar postbellum attacks befell more than 140 other Serbian Orthodox sites in summer 1999; over half of Kosovo’s

Christian architecture was systematically targeted, primarily by KLA members.126 These losses included numerous medieval monasteries like Zočište which are the basis for Serbian sacred architectural style and liturgical art – an erased link in Serbian art history.127

During the Kosovo War, Kosovar Albanians largely viewed the destruction of Serbian architecture as something to be heralded rather than decried; their nationalist myths of historic occupation and Albanian supremacy largely prevented them from empathizing with the symbolic meaning of such architecture to others. For example, while Serbs from rural parts of Kosovo flocked to Priština during the conflict because they “felt safer clustered around the concrete symbols of Serbian power,” Kosovar Albanians reviled these Yugoslav constructions as emblems of oppression.128 During the NATO bombardment of Priština in March 1999, Kosovar

Albanian war reporter Gjeraqina Tuhina summarized such sentiments:

“I felt happy last night for the first time as I watched the Ministry of Interior building in the center of town be completely destroyed. I proudly stood at the window, watching. There are only ashes now where before the huge, armored police vehicles would begin their daily tours. At least something of ‘theirs’ has been destroyed and people can finally see it. The big mushroom of flames that lit the night looked so beautiful. When we saw that huge, ugly building burning we didn’t care so much about the consequences of the attacks... so what if the windows in the nearby Serbian apartments were blown out by the blast? We just hope that the attacks continue.”129

After the War:

125 Ibid. 126 Herscher, Violence Taking Place. 127 Jovan Janićijević, The Cultural Treasury of Serbia, Second Edition, Trans. Alice Copple-Tošić (Belgrade: Idea Publishing, 2001). 128 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 312. 129 Gjeraqina Tuhina, “The Knock on the Door,” IWPR Balkan Crisis Report no. 12, 30 March 1999. 46

Serbian and Kosovar Albanian leaders have consistently claimed that the international

community has overlooked the destruction of their respective sacred architecture in the aftermath

of the conflict; so too have they downplayed their own nation’s role in exacting the destruction

of cultural heritage. This reflects the fact that while the Kosovo War ended with an armistice in

June 1999, a conflict over whose architecture remains more important, more sacred continues.

Serbian documentaries, propaganda, and political statements still tend to frame medieval Serbian

architecture as civilizational heritage, while Albanian heritage is diminished as simply that.130

Kosovar Albanians have charged that international restoration work has been biased towards

rebuilding Serbian Orthodox churches, an unfair assertion considering that virtually all domestic

restoration efforts by the Republic of Kosovo have targeted Albanian heritage. While the United

Nations and international NGOs have closely supervised Kosovo’s transition towards complete

and fully-recognized independence, few efforts have been made to address nationalist narratives

resulting in increased polarization between Kosovar Albanian nationalists and Serbian

nationalists.

In March 2004, this failure to address nationalist tensions sparked a series of widespread

riots (occasionally referred to as pogroms) resulting in nineteen deaths, 950 injuries, hundreds of

Serbian homes damaged or destroyed, 4,500 displaced people (predominately Serbs), and the

destruction of an additional 36 Serbian Orthodox churches.131 These events ultimately provoked a Serb boycott of all Kosovar Albanian institutions which largely continues today.132 Although

Kosovar Albanian politicians largely blamed economic factors for the uprisings, interviews with

arrested rioters demonstrate that the attacks were clearly motivated by nationalist fervor which

130 Boris Malagurski, Kosovo: A Moment in Civilization (, BC: Malagurski Cinema, 2017). 131 Jose-Maria Arraiza, “A Matter of Balance: Cultural Heritage, Property Rights, and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Kosovo,” Presented at Seminar on Property and Investment in Jus Post Bellum, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, June 2014, The Hague. 132 Antić, The History of Serbia, 321. 47

continues to glorify some at the dehumanizing expense of others.133 According to Kosovo

scholar Frances Trix, many Kosovar Albanian instigators reported that they “had been told that it

was their duty to burn churches” now that they held power – burning churches was seen as a

necessary display of hard-earned dominance.134 Narratives of martyrdom invoked by Slobodan

Milošević are now reflected at the forefront of the Kosovar Albanian ethos: an analysis of the

Kosovo daily newspaper “provides ample evidence of newly developing myths of heroes, martyrs, and traitors of the Kosovo War and of the national cause.”135 Across the

geopolitically fraught Kosovar-Serbian border, rhetoric remains equally inflammatory. In 2008,

then-prime minister of Serbia Vojislav Koštunica excitedly asked a Belgrade rally of 200,000:

“What is Kosovo? Where is Kosovo? Whose is Kosovo? Is there anyone among us who is not from Kosovo? Is there anyone among us who thinks that Kosovo does not belong to us? Kosovo – that’s Serbia’s first name. Kosovo belongs to Serbia. Kosovo belongs to the Serbian people. That is how it has been forever... There is no force, no threat, and no punishment big and hideous enough for any Serb, at any time, to say anything different but, Kosovo is Serbia!”136

While the international community – and certainly Kosovar Albanians – largely panicked upon

hearing such rhetoric, the Serbian press widely reprinted the speech and positively compared it to

Milošević’s speech at Kosovo Polje. Politika reprinted Koštunica’s speech under the headline:

“It’s not over!”137

133 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 410. 134 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 410. 135 Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, “Narratives of Power: Capacities of Myth in Albania,” Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), 18. 136 Vojislav Koštunica, “Kosovo je Srbija,” Speech, Belgrade, 21 February 2008. 137 Politika, “Није Готово! [It’s Not Over!],” 22 February 2008. 48

Chapter 2: Fears of Extermination

Before the War:

Balkan history is filled with examples of ethnic cleansing as conquering and

reconquering empires fighting over this geopolitical crossroads have long sought to assert and

affirm territorial control through the removal of rival inhabitants. Such events are imbedded in

the narratives and legends of both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs; their literature and arts have

long drawn inspiration from ethnic cleansing as emblematic of both of their respective nations’

eternal victimhood and perseverance. Architectural destruction often plays a key role in such

narratives because permanent structures provide physical, enduring links between people and the

land upon which they reside; removal of these structures thus severs the physical relationship

between a location and its inhabitants. Just as architecture itself provides symbolic security,

fosters belonging, and tangibly manifests the character of a nation, its destruction prompts acute

fears of national vulnerability. As Ottoman control of the Balkans fractured during the Balkan

Wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “hundreds of thousands of people migrated

from areas controlled by the other religious faith to areas controlled by their own,” a cycle of

ethnic cleansing repeated with border fluctuations.138 These periods of ethnic upheaval nearly

always featured widespread architectural destruction, especially as newly independent Serbs

sought to emphasize their independence through the destruction of Ottoman architecture.

While symbolic narratives featuring architectural cleansing as a stand-in for ethnic cleansing reside at the core of Serbian and Kosovar Albanian identity, leaders from both nations

138 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 168. 49 activated these underlying anxieties into fears of extermination to bolster their own political agendas in the decades preceding the Kosovo War. Slobodan Milošević and his Serbian nationalist allies manipulated fears of extermination among Serbs to legitimize their desired consolidation of political power across Yugoslavia as the only means of ensuring national security. Meanwhile, the KLA and other Kosovar Albanian nationalists stoked unfounded fears of their impending expulsion into Albania in the hopes of discouraging passivity and enlisting support for independence – submitted as the only viable national defense. Familiar architecture, meanwhile, took on an increasingly important role illustrating the promise of security, with constructions emblematic of national belonging, physical homes, and built environments proving historic continuity all representing the inextricability of both nations from Kosovo. Conversely, architecture of the opposing nation increasingly validated fears of extermination through its mere presence in spaces leaders had trained supporters to view as theirs alone. In the decades prior to the Kosovo War, Serbs and Kosovar Albanians increasingly sought to purify the architectural landscapes of Kosovo and in doing so assert the permanence of their occupation.

Serbs and Kosovar Albanians share a long history of employing propagandist demographic claims to confirm their victimization and inflame fears of their erasure. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, for example, Serbian nationalists alleged that “hundreds of thousands” of Albanians living in Kosovo – the vast majority of the population – were recent colonists shipped into the region from Albania during the territory’s military occupation.139

Kosovar Albanians, meanwhile, “claimed that following the reimposition of Yugoslav rule in

Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of Albanians were ‘deported.’”140 These contradictory claims are both equally baseless, but such so-called evidence of ethnic cleansing was invoked by nationalist

139 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 150. 140 Ibid. 50

politicians throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, the aforementioned invented narratives

were often invoked alongside narratives of genuine ethnic cleansings, muddying the average

citizen’s ability to differentiate between imagined insecurities and verified historical trauma.

During World War II, Serbs faced widespread persecution throughout the Western

Balkans but especially in territories controlled by the Axis-allied Croatian Ustaša government where the interment and slaughter of ethnic Serbs has been widely documented as a genocide.141

Comparatively, the number of Serbs killed by the Albanian fascist regime in Kosovo appears relatively small, with around 5,000 Kosovar Serbs believed to have lost their lives during the occupation (compared to between 3,000 and 12,000 Kosovar Albanians).142 However, the

Albanian regime also forcibly removed between 70,000 and 100,000 Serbs from Kosovo, only a

small portion of which returned to the territory following the conflict.143 These purges were

directly orchestrated under the leadership of Prime Minister Mustafa Merlika-Kruja who, in

1942, held a public speech advocating, in part:

“We should endeavor to ensure that the Serb population of Kosovo [be] removed as soon as possible... all indigenous Serbs who have been living here for centuries should be termed colonialists and as such, via the Albanian and Italian governments, should be sent [away]... Serbian settlers should be killed.”144

The Albanian fascist government’s systematic purges of Kosovar Serbs were also accompanied

by architectural cleansing, especially in rural areas. In 1942, Italian civil commissioner Carlo

141 Serious scientific and historical works on genocide unequivocally classify crimes against Serbs in the Ustaša government’s Independent State of Croatia as a genocide, with many extending this designation to include actions in Axis-occupied Serbia, , and Kosovo. Yad Vashem and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - two leading Holocaust remembrance organizations - include the removal of Serbs from Albanian-occupied Kosovo as a Holocaust crime. While recent presidents of all other ex- Yugoslav states (including Croatia) have addressed the persecution of Serbs during World War II as a genocide, no such recognition has been officially extended by governments of Albania or independent Kosovo. 142 Malcolm, Kosovo, 312. 143 Sabrina P Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation (Durham: Duke U P, 1995), 198. 144 Quoted in Jens Reuter, “Albaniens nationale Frage [Albania’s National Question],” Der Kosovo Krieg: Ursachen, Verlaug, Perspektiven [The Kosovo War: Causes, Courses, Prospects] (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2000), 158. 51

Umiltà observed that “the Albanians are out to exterminate the Slavs... not a single house has a

roof; everything has been burned down.”145

Kosovar Albanians faced expulsion in even greater numbers in the decades immediately

preceding and following World War II under Serbian nationalist policies that explicitly called for

the “Serbianization” of Kosovo.146 In the 1920s, this policy consisted of blocking Albanians

from all professional employment and shutting down Albanian-language schooling in an effort

“to keep the Kosovar Albanians ignorant and illiterate.”147 These oppressive policies resulted in

nearly half of the region’s population emigrating, primarily to neighboring Albania. Later, in

1937, Serbian Royal Academy of Sciences chair Vaso Čubrilović declared that if Serbia did not drive all Kosovar Albanians from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, “within twenty to thirty years we shall have to cope with a terrible irredentism... at a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the shifting of a few hundred thousand Albanians will not lead to the outbreak of a world war.”148 Such blatant calls to completely extirpate the Kosovar Albanians from their land

continued largely uncritiqued throughout the Yugoslav period, as well. Indeed, Čubrilović

himself went on to become one of Tito’s closest advisors and a government minister.

Tito’s Yugoslav government continued policies “severely constraining the teaching of

Albanian cultural traditions, literature, folklore, and history” and purposefully blocked much-

needed investment in the region.149 The number of schools per capita in Kosovo before 1968 was

less than half that in Serbia proper, while per capita income was only 28% the national

145 Quoted in Smilja Avramov, Genocide in Yugoslavia (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995), 186. 146 Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe, 198. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibrahim Berisha et al, Serbian Colonization and Ethnic Cleansing of Kosovo: Documents and Evidence (Priština: U of Kosovo P, 1993), 23. 149 Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe, 199. 52

average.150 Coupled with these policies was an official effort to promote ethnic Albanian

emigration to Turkey organized by Yugoslav police chief Aleksandar Ranković that resulted in

approximately 100,000 Kosovar Albanians departing the country.151 Finally, “communism was

responsible for a program of planned destruction of cultural heritage in Kosovo,” with the

historic Priština Bazaar and other Ottoman-era Kosovar Albanian urban neighborhoods expropriated by the State apparatus and bulldozed to make way for government buildings and apartment blocks.152

While the Yugoslav government’s urban development projects in Priština intended to

modernize the city under the slogan of “destroy the old, build the new,” Kosovar Albanian

inhabitants largely saw efforts to bring the urban landscape in line with that of Belgrade as a

form of architectural colonization wiping out aspects of their own architecture which made the

city unique.153 Yugoslav officials boasted at the time that in Priština, “old shop fronts and other

shaky old structures are quickly disappearing to make room for fine, tall, modern-style

buildings.”154 But these shaky old structures (see Appendix C, figures 8-9) represented, for

Kosovar Albanians, “the spiritual center of the town... the historic center of the region.”155 The

weaponization of Yugoslavia’s urban development policies against Albanian heritage was further

demonstrated by the hypocritical efforts of Tito’s government to classify dozens of Serbian

churches and monasteries throughout Kosovo as cultural monuments while simultaneously

promoting the “annihilation of the past” sacred to Kosovar Albanians.156 As Kosovar Albanian

150 Denisa Kostovicova, “Shkolla Shqipe and Nationhood: Albanians in Pursuit of Education in the Native Language in Interwar and Post-Autonomy Kosovo,” Albanian Identities: Myth and History, Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2002), 159. 151 Malcolm, Kosovo. 152 European Stability Initiative, A Future for Prishtina’s Past (Priština: European Stability Initiative, 2006), 18. 153 Teuta Jashari-Kajtazi and Arta Jakupi, “Interpretation of Architectural Identity Through Landmark Architecture: The Case of Prishtina, Kosovo from the 1970s to the 1980s,” Frontiers of Architectural Research, vol. 6, no. 4 (Beijing: KeAi, 2017). 154 European Stability Initiative, A Future for Prishtina’s Past (Priština: European Stability Initiative, 2006), 3. 155 Ibid, 4. 156 Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 29. 53

architectural historian Florina Jerliu summarizes, the destruction of the Priština Bazaar and its

maze of cobbled artisan shops, historic mosques, and Ottoman administrative buildings

transformed the cityscape into “a completely unfamiliar environment. It felt as though it was no longer our city, as though its heart had been torn out.”157

Albanian fears of cultural erasure and extermination dissipated somewhat following the

1968 protests that largely coalesced around the Priština Bazaar’s destruction as a political

rallying cry. These protests resulted in improved working conditions, expanded educational

opportunities for Kosovar Albanians, and prompted the removal of Čubrilović and Ranković – as

well as numerous other architects of anti-Albanian policies – from political power. However, whatever progress was made to diminish tensions between Kosovo’s Serbian and Albanian communities was shattered by the 1986 leak of the unpublished Memorandum on Yugoslavia’s

Situation by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, an event described by historians and

Balkan scholars as “a political earthquake.”158 While Yugoslav census returns indicate that

Kosovo’s Serbian population hovered around 200,000 since World War II, the Memorandum

baselessly insisted that 200,000 Serbs had been “forced” to leave Kosovo over the preceding two

decades, inflaming deep-seated Serbian anxieties about Kosovo’s changing demographics.159

The Memorandum further asserted that “it is not just that the last of the remnants of the Serbian

nation are leaving their homes at an unabated rate, but according to all evidence, faced with a

physical, moral, and psychological reign of terror, they seem to be preparing for their final

exodus.”160 Indeed, one passage of the text explicitly presented the contemporary situation in

Kosovo as a parallel to the migrations led by Patriarch Arsenije to escape persecution by the

157 Florina Jerliu, skype interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris, 1 April 2021. 158 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 158. 159 Ibid. 160 Меморандум САНУ. 54

Ottoman Empire in 1690, and declared that “the physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide

of the Serbian population in Kosovo and Metohija is a worse historical defeat than any

experienced in the liberation wars waged by Serbia.”161

Such inflammatory statements raised alarm throughout Serbia, a panic exacerbated by the

Serbian media which “added to the furor by printing unsubstantiated charges of brutal rapes of

Serbs by Albanians in Kosovo.”162 According to political scientist Stuart Kaufman, these

“charges of murder and ‘genocide’ and endless invocations of the slogan ‘only unity can save the

Serbs’ created and fed the fear of ethnic extinction that is the driving force of ethnic violence.”163

As a result, sporadic acts of vandalism inflicted upon Serbian architecture – or even Yugoslav

state architecture – throughout Kosovo began to take on new context as evidence of an imagined

cultural genocide, driving urgent fears, nationalist fervor, and calls for retaliation. Conversations

about the historic persecution of Serbs under Albanian fascists again surged to the covers of

Serbian-language newspapers despite decades of suppression in the name of peace and progress.

Ironically, the demographic shifts reported in the Memorandum (which in actuality consisted of a stagnant, not shrinking, Kosovar Serbian population) were most impacted by the same economic and social policies initiated to encourage Kosovar Albanian emigration under Tito. As efforts to isolate the region led to widespread economic instabilities, younger generations of Serbs moved from Kosovo to Serbia in increasing numbers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to pursue better- funded educational programs, improved economic opportunity, and a higher quality of life.

The Memorandum fundamentally changed conversations about Kosovo within Serbia and fueled right-wing nationalist fears that Slobodan Milošević deftly rode to political power. Within

161 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 158; Меморандум САНУ. 162 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 179. 163 Ibid, 180. 55 a year of his election, he removed Albanians from all state agencies and public jobs in an effort to purposefully render economic security so unattainable for Kosovar Albanians that they would be forced to emigrate. Coupled with these oppressive measures, Milošević also channeled officially secular state funds towards building Serbian Orthodox churches throughout Kosovo in an effort to assuage fears of extermination, submitting the program as an act of cultural reconstruction beneficial to all Yugoslav citizens.164 These so-called Milošević churches, which represented a clear attempt to change the cultural landscape, inflamed Kosovar Albanian fears; they responded by accelerating their own construction of mosques and Albanian-language schools.165 Moreover, “the Serbian drive to revoke Kosovo’s autonomy in the late 1980s stirred

Albanian fears that with it, all their cultural rights would be revoked as well.”166

Just as Serbian fears of extermination exploded into the mainstream following the

Memorandum’s publication, Kosovar Albanian fears materialized around a work of nineteenth- century epic poetry granted new importance under the Milošević administration. While Tito had banned from being taught in the Yugoslav school system due to its controversiality, Milošević rehabilitated the text as one of Yugoslavia’s most important works of literary heritage and required its instruction in Kosovo beginning in 1990. The Mountain Wreath centers on a Montenegrin leader’s decision to forcibly convert conquered Muslim villagers to

Christianity; the poem ends with the mass murder of Muslim villagers who refuse in an action heralded as a great victory.167 The text also refers to Muslims as “loathsome degenerates and questions: “why do we need the Turk’s faith among us?”168 The Mountain Wreath’s promotion so intensely provoked fears of an impending Kosovar Albanian genocide that the KLA used it as

164 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 405. 165 Ibid. 166 Kostovicova, “Shkolla Shqipe and Nationhood,” Albanian Identities, Eds. Schwandner-Sievers and Fischer, 163. 167 Petar II Petrović Njegoš, Gorski Vijenac [The Mountain Wreath] (Vienna: Mekhitarist Monastery of Vienna, 1847). 168 Ibid. 56

a recruiting tool allegedly proving what Serbs would do to them if they refused to submit as

second-class citizens.169 The KLA coupled their messaging with symbolic examples of

Milošević church constructions viewed as offensive attacks on their landscape, especially that of

the Church of Christ the Savior erected in central Priština in 1992. According to Kosovar

Albanian sociologist Shemsi Krasniqi, this church was not constructed “based on any need for

spiritual devotion as much as on a need for physical and institutional aggression.”170 Erected on

the University of Priština campus from which Albanian enrollment had been recently excluded,

the church stood meters away from the site of an Ottoman-era mosque bulldozed as part of the

Priština Bazaar’s destruction.171 As one KLA recruitment pamphlet stated, “They will bury us

beneath their churches if we do not bury them first.”172

During the War:

As tensions between the KLA and Milošević government erupted into conflict in early

1998, Serbs and Kosovar Albanian expressed an internalized kill-or-be-killed mentality through a destroy-or-be-destroyed approach to architectural devastation. Both militia groups led by the

KLA and by the Yugoslav government claimed territory largely by clearing rival populations: throughout 1998, the KLA burned numerous Serbian villages to the ground in the countryside surrounding Orahovac while Serbian paramilitaries, in turn, launched “a coordinated and systematic campaign to terrorize, kill, and expel Albanians” from numerous other communities.173 By the war’s official conclusion in June 1999, “over forty percent of [Kosovar]

Albanian homes had been destroyed” in the conflict, including more than 500 historic stone

169 Kosovo Liberation Army Recruitment Pamphlet, Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës [Kosovo Liberation Army], 1997. 170 Donjeta Demoli, “Kosovo Mulls Fate of Milošević-Era Cathedral,” Balkan Insight, 31 October 2012. 171 Jerliu, skype interview, 1 April 2021. 172 Kosovo Liberation Army Recruitment Pamphlet, Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës [Kosovo Liberation Army], 1997. 173 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 406. 57

kullas.174 In the village of Landovica (Landovicë), the destruction of a historic Kosovar Albanian

mosque was accompanied by the removal of corpses from the adjoining Muslim cemetery;

participating Serbian soldiers later stated that they believed Kosovar Albanians were unworthy of

even being laid to rest in Kosovar soil.175 Yet while Serbian paramilitaries destroyed more than

one third of mosques in Kosovo and “three out four well-preserved Ottoman-era urban cored in

Kosovo... each with great loss of historic architecture,” leaders continued to frame the conflict as

a defensive action in both domestic and international messaging.176 The Milošević government

directly encouraged such fear through events like the Panda Bar Massacre, an attack which killed

six Serbian teenagers in Peć in December 1998. Two decades later, the Serbian government

“officially acknowledged that the murder had been perpetrated by agents of the Serbian Secret

Service” as justification for escalating military efforts against Kosovar Albanians.177 Heavily publicized events such as this continued to promote and justify a need to not only reestablish control over Kosovo but scrape the region clear of all Kosovar Albanians. Immediately after the

Panda Bar incident, Serbs bulldozed Ottoman bazaars in Peć and Vučitrn (Vushtrri) to permanently erase evidence of these Kosovar Albanian neighborhoods’ historic composition.178

Destruction of Kosovar Albanian heritage by Serbian troops, police, and paramilitaries

took place as Kosovar Albanians were being expelled “to diminish these peoples’ incentive to

return to their hometowns and villages, but also after expulsions took place, apparently to

remove visible evidence” of these deported communities.179 Motivated by fears of Kosovar

174 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 407. 175 Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 95. 176 Andrew Herscher and András Riedlmayer, “Monument and Crime: The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo,” Grey Room no. 1 (Autumn 2000), 112. 177 Daan Everts, Peacekeeping in Albania and Kosovo: Conflict Response and International Intervention in the Western Balkans, 1997-2002 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 50. 178 Herscher and Riedlmayer, “Monument and Crime,” Grey Room no. 1, 108-122. 179 Ibid, 111. 58

Albanians return to territories from which they had been cleared, many Serbian nationalists attempted all within their power to render repatriation an impossibility. As Kosovar Albanians lined up in massive motorcades to flee the violence, “their money and goods were stolen and women and girls were raped. The police told the refugees that they would have no way of proving that they had ever lived in Kosovo and they would have no homes to return to.”180 Both

Serbs and Kosovar Albanians weaponized rape alongside architectural destruction during the conflict as forms of ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure. According to a report by Kosovar

Albanian legal scholar Hirad Abtahi released shortly after the conflict, “in the same way that rape became an instrument to destroy the adversary’s identity… the destruction and pillage of the adversary’s non-renewable cultural resources, became a tool to erase the manifestation of the adversary’s identity.”181 Efforts to erase Serbian culture through rape and architectural destruction escalated following the June 1999 armistice when KLA members vandalized, robbed, and burned Serbian homes, villages, and sacred sites; threatened Serb refugees “in precisely reciprocal terms to the threats made by Serb forces;” and raped, abducted, or killed Serbian women.182 While such actions were largely retaliatory, they must also be understood as compelled by fears of extermination. “We felt that if any Serbian family lived near us, we would wake up with a knife to our throat,” recalls former KLA member Fatos Hoxha, “so everything done to strip Serbs of security and encourage them to go back to Serbia... it was the only way to ensure our safety.”183

The destroy-or-be-destroyed mentality adopted by Serbian military units and government agencies during the Kosovo conflict also helped rationalize attempts to erase Kosovar Albanian

180 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 407. 181 Abtahi, “The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict,” Harvard Human Rights Journal vol. 14, no. 1. 182 Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 133. 183 Hoxha, (former KLA member), zoom interview, 28 February 2021. 59

movable cultural heritage. The destruction of the Islamic Archives in Priština, attacks on public

libraries throughout Kosovo, and demolition of museums like that of the League of Prizren not

only inflicted architectural damage on present generations of Kosovar Albanians, but sought “to

orphan future generations and destroy their understanding of who they are and from where they

come.”184 These efforts paralleled similar attempts to erase Bosniak culture during the Bosnian

War several years earlier, where targets bombed by the Army of included

regional archives, local and national museums, the Academy of Music in Sarajevo, the National

Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the National Library. As summarized by Bosnian

historian Igor Ordev, these attacks on cultural heritage reflected a strategy to remove “everything

that represented a sign that such a nation had existed.”185 Following the June 1999 Military

Technical Agreement ending the Kosovo conflict, Serbian authorities also confiscated the entire

catalog of archival records held by the Kosovo Institute for the Protection of Monuments, plus

1,248 archaeological and ethnographical exhibit pieces from the Kosovo Museum.186 These

documents and artifacts remain held by the Serbian government in Belgrade today and are a

lasting point of contention among Kosovar Albanians.187 “When [Serbian leaders] realized they

could not steal our country, they stole our history,” notes the head of Kosovo’s Institute of

Archaeology, Enver Rexha, “how can we build a future when we cannot study or observe our

own history?”188

184 Abtahi, “The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict,” Harvard Human Rights Journal vol. 14, no. 1. 185 Igor Ordev, “Erasing the Past: Destruction and Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Former Yugoslavia: Part 1,” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 28, no. 4 (Newburg, OR: George Fox U P, 2008), 23. 186 European Stability Initiative, A Future for Prishtina’s Past (Priština: European Stability Initiative, 2006), 18. 187 Only one of the 1248 artifacts taken from the Kosovo Museum in June 1999 has been returned to Kosovo by Serbian authorities, the ‘Goddess on the Throne’ terracotta figurine. No archival documents have been repatriated. 188 Enver Rexha, skype interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris, 23 March 2021. 60

After the War:

Immediately after the Kosovo Conflict’s resolution through the Military Technical

Agreement, Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljević condemned the international

intervention on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. “The true goal of the Albanian political leaders

does not seem to be [a] democratic and multiethnic Kosovo, but rather an ethnically cleansed

region in which everything belonging to the Serbian people is despised and exposed to

destruction and humiliation,” he asserted in an open letter delivered to international news

outlets.189 Considering the systematic destruction of Serbian architecture – especially sacred

architecture of the Serbian Orthodox Church, these comments seem understandable, if one-sided.

As Bishop Artemije summarized, the destruction of Serbian monuments and architectural sites indeed functioned as “a clear message to Serbs that there is no place for them and their culture in

Kosovo,” and a symptom of the “culturocide [sic] of Serbian people.”190 After the war, reflected

Serbian historian Čedomir Antić, “Kosovo lost its ethnic diversity and essentially became a

mono-ethnic region with Albanians making up over 90% of its population.”191 But if the Serbian

fear expressed in the 1986 Memorandum were indeed realized in the aftermath of the Kosovo

War, were these fears legitimate all along?

While Serbian nationalists continue to make this exact argument, the escalatory events

and rhetoric immediately preceding the Kosovo War as well as the Serbian-led destruction of

Kosovar Albanian culture and mass ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanian villages during the war are generally omitted from such arguments. The destruction of Serbian architectural heritage and villages at the terminus of the war seems instead primarily driven by Kosovar Albanian fears

189 Bishop Artemije Radosavljević, “Letter of Protest,” The Guardian, 8 July 1999. 190 Ibid. 191 Antić, The History of Serbia, 321. 61 which were directly sparked by Serbian propaganda efforts and the violence they incited.

Moreover, numerous demographic studies of Serbian refugees fleeing Kosovo in the aftermath of the war have found that the vast majority were not expelled by Kosovar Albanians but rather fled because of their fears of extermination internalized over the previous two decades through the direct efforts of their political and religious leaders.192

Nevertheless, the aftermath of the Kosovo War did not lead to the desired de-escalation of nationalist fears of extermination between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs: Serbs continued to fear complete extermination from the territory in which they were becoming an increasingly scant minority through emigration to Serbia proper while Kosovar Albanians continued to fear

Serbia’s claim to return and assert control over the territory with its ambiguous international status. Even in the absence of rational or immediate danger, these fears remain deeply internalized through generations of reinforcement, and thus are capable of exploding to the surface at the slightest provocation.

On 16 March 2004, three Kosovar Albanian children drowned in the Ibar (Ibër) River near the Serbian community of Zubin Potok (Zubin Potoku), with a fourth surviving youth claiming that he and his friends had been chased into the river by Serbs.193 This claim was later officially refuted by the United Nations, but was taken as proof by Kosovar Albanian leaders – many of whom were former KLA members – that Serbs and Albanians could never inhabit the same land as one another.194 A tidal wave of violent riots surged across Kosovo, directly targeting numerous churches and cultural monuments of importance to Serbs.195 In Prizren alone,

192 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab; Herscher, Violence Taking Place; Malcolm, Kosovo. 193 Human Rights Watch, “Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, March 2004,” Human Rights Watch vol. 16, no. 6 (New York: Human Rights Watch, July 2004), 19. 194 UN News, “Lack of Evidence Stalls Probe into Drowning of 3 Kosovo Children, UN Mission Says,” 28 April 2004. 195 Herscher, Violence Taking Place. 62

seven medieval churches were attacked while mobs burned hundreds of Serbian inhabitants out

of the city’s historic Orthodox Christian quarter. At the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Church

of Our Lady of Ljeviš, rioters chanted “ne nuk jemi të sigurt nën kryq! [we are not safe under the

cross!]” while throwing Molotov cocktails into the fourteenth century building and hacking a

bronze cross from the belltower (see Appendix C, figure 11).196 Other architectural victims just

outside Prizren included the fourteenth century Monastery of the Holy Archangels and Church of

the Holy Trinity, both of which were burned and dynamited despite the presence of United

Nations peacekeeping forces in the immediate vicinity (see Appendix C, figures 12-13).197 Amid

the chaos, the Kosovar press “depicted the burning of these buildings as a carnival, with crowds

gathering in adjacent streets to witness the fires, wave banners and flags, and celebrate.”198

Over 51,000 Kosovar Albanian citizens are estimated to have participated in the 2004 unrest, but the mass nature of this violence has prevented any real repercussions for the architectural destruction and ethnic cleansing incurred.199 Moreover, the United Nations Mission

in Kosovo (UNMIK) declined to label the 2004 riots as an act of ethnic cleansing despite their

obliteration of Kosovo’s remaining Serbian urban communities in Prizren and Đakovica

(Gjakovë); instead, UNMIK sought to blame economic factors that were more easily confronted

than pervasive nationalist fears as the inciting factor of the violence.200 But the motivation

behind architectural destruction matters far less than its interpretation by those groups for whom

the architecture in question holds symbolic value: “regardless of motivation, when local

authorities fail to respond adequately [to architectural destruction] the perception of threat by the

196 KTV News Report, 17 March 2004, accessed via National Library of Kosovo Media Resource Center, 20 April 2021. 197 Human Rights Watch, “Failure to Protect,” Human Rights Watch vol. 16, no. 6. 198 Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 149. 199 Human Rights Watch, “Failure to Protect,” Human Rights Watch vol. 16, no. 6, 1; B92, “11 Years Since ‘March Pogrom’ of Serbs in Kosovo,” 17 March 2015. 200 Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 149. 63

Serbs increases.”201 And so Serbian fears of extermination in Kosovo remain a central talking point of Serbian politics and propaganda today, even among diaspora populations. A 2017 documentary by Serbian-Canadian director Boris Malagurski cited vandalism at Gračanica

Monastery as “evidence of an Albanian attempt to wipe out the existence and the values of the

Serbian people in Kosovo,” despite the fact that such vandalism has been dated to the Ottoman occupation when no such Albanian nationalist efforts were under way.202

Meanwhile, in Kosovo itself, Kosovar Albanians continue to perceive a need to assert

control over their fears of extermination despite controlling a massive supermajority within

Kosovar politics and facing no legitimate risk of Kosovo’s status being revoked. Throughout

Kosovo, Serbian place names on officially-bilingual road signs are repeatedly crossed out or

graffitied over, demonstrating that Kosovar Albanians still feel vulnerable enough to need to

assert and re-assert their claim to the territory and its place names.203 While many international

non-governmental organizations have praised relatively fast efforts from Kosovar Albanians to

rebuild from the war as likely to diminish national trauma and indicative of economic recovery,

these “frantic efforts” to build up the landscape may be better understood as reflective of a desire

to entrench Kosovar Albanian belonging against persistent fears of extermination “despite

continued economic hardship.”204

201 Arraiza, “A Matter of Balance,” Presented at Seminar on Property and Investment in Jus Post Bellum, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, June 2014, The Hague. 202 Malagurski, Kosovo: A Moment in Civilization. 203 OSCE Mission in Kosovo, “Cleaning of Defaced Road Signs in Kosovo,” 13 November 2017, Youtube video. 204 Jerliu, skype interview, 1 April 2021. 64

Chapter 3: Historical Trauma

Before the War:

On an anthropological trip through the Ottoman Balkans in 1909, British anthropologist

Edith Durham described life in Ottoman Kosovo as “an elemental struggle for existence and survival of the strongest, carried out in relentless obedience to Nature’s law, which says, ‘there is not room for you both – you must kill or be killed.”205 Kosovo’s long history is punctuated by numerous retaliatory historic cycles wherein architectural destruction has been repeatedly exacted by one resident nation against another, urging cathartic and retaliatory violence against the perpetrators. Viewing the most recent Kosovo War through this lens, it can appear as though the destruction incurred between 1998 and 2004 is rooted not in contemporary leadership, media propaganda, or nationalist rhetoric but in the burden of historical trauma endured across centuries by both Serbs and Kosovar Albanians. Indeed, historian Tim Judah reflects, long “before Kosovo declared independence, it was often said that the Balkan conflicts had begun there and would end there.”206 Nevertheless, architectural destruction through the actions of man is never inevitable, and the damage inflicted upon the region of Kosovo is not an organic response to historical trauma but rather one conditioned by leaders deliberately invoking historic cycles of destruction as the bases for their sociopolitical agendas. While understanding Kosovo’s long history of architectural violence remains crucial to dismantling it, architectural violence remains the result of carefully wielded narratives that latched onto internalized traumas as nationalist symbols.

Architecture holds the power to physically “implicate the individual members of the culture into its dominant value systems, assure the culture at large of its practical adequacy in the

205 Edith Durham, High Albania (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), 294. 206 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 354. 65

world by affirming and confirming its ideologies, convince the audience that their status and

identity as individuals is guaranteed by the culture as a whole, and transmit by these means a

sense of cultural membership.”207 Because architecture exists as both a product and emblem of

national identity, its destruction is internalized as traumatic attacks on each individual member of

that nation: a direct violation of their cultural belonging.208 Internalized trauma from

architectural destruction, like any collective trauma, may then be transmitted across generations

through narratives of loss, as demonstrated by psychological studies of the Rwandan

Genocide.209 According to mental health expert Dan Reidenberg, “collective trauma changes

history and memory... it changes the way we process and see not only the trauma that was

experienced, but what we do with our memory of it as we move forward.”210 Trauma-induced

social divisions thus form the bases of historical myths asserting a central role in national

identity. Throughout the Balkan Peninsula, narratives of cultural loss, victimhood, traumatic

defeat, or national subjugation not only define membership in a particular nation but also the

parameters delineating enemies and outsiders; they manifest as myths that may be activated

consciously or unconsciously to ignite fear, conflict, or retaliation in the future. As summarized

by a document intended to train American peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, “traumatized

societies sometimes engage in historical images and fantasies that may bear little relation to

reality... by helping to mark group identities, and through leader-follower interaction, chosen

traumas can be reactivated over time to provide the fuel for war.”211

207 Michael E Geisler, “Introduction: What Are National Symbols and What Do They Do To Us?” National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative, Eds. Michael E Geisler (Middlebury: Middlebury College P, 2005), xxviii. 208 Bernard Tschumi, “Violence of Architecture,” Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 121-137. 209 Ervin Staub, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Alexandra Gubin, and Athenase Hagengimana, “Healing Reconciliation, Forgiving, and the Prevention of Violence After Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology vol. 24, no. 3 (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 297-334. 210 Caroline Bologna, “How is Collective Trauma Different from Individual Trauma?” Huffington Post, 9 April 2021. 211 Institute of Peace, Training to Help Traumatized Populations (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001), 3. 66

As demonstrated previously, Serbian and Kosovar Albanian national histories are filled

with collectively traumatic events that remain at the forefront of identity. Not only do Serbian

nationalist narratives draw from the Battle of Kosovo, but also from the Ottoman Devshirme

Levy or blood tax which forcibly removed children from Balkan Christian families for service in

the Ottoman army or government; from the fact that, trapped between the Central Powers of

Europe, Serbia suffered the highest civilian casualty rate and level of destruction during the First

World War; from the internment and genocide of Serbian civilians living under the control of the

Croatian Ustaša or in Nazi-occupied Serbia; from the destruction of Serbian villages in Kosovo

at the hands of Albanian fascists during World War II.212 Kosovar Albanians, meanwhile,

remember their villages burning following the Ottoman Empire’s collapse during the First World

War; the traumatic periods of mass emigration imposed by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and

Socialist Yugoslavia; the removal of their rights to Albanian-language education; the mass

imprisonments of the late 1940s when they as a nation were viewed under suspicion of terrorism;

the destruction of the Priština Bazaar and other urban cultural forums. These long histories of

victimhood are easily invoked to justify further violence as retaliatory justice and have been for

generations. “Pogroms against Serbs began immediately” after the Albanian government took

control of Kosovo in 1941, for example, “in ‘retaliation’ for poor Serbian treatment of

Albanians” under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (see Appendix C, Figure 14).213

Officially, the Socialist Yugoslav government approached collective trauma through a

policy banning the invocation of nationalist narratives rather than grappling with historical

traumas; rather than seeking to address the underlying reasons for why so many Kosovar

212 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition; the Devshirme Levy (danak u krvi; devshirmeja) was imposed upon the Orthodox Christian Balkans for over 200 years, from 1438 to 1648. 213 Ibid, 131. 67

Albanians wished to expel Kosovar Serbs through fascism, Tito’s administration criminalized open debate or consideration of such events.214 Atonement for the past and national reconciliation were to be attained through progress rather than mourning, so when Kosovar

Albanian rights and representation structures were expanded, as one example, they received no government apology or public acknowledgement for the oppressive previous status quo. This approach to collective trauma buried history deemed inconvenient towards national unity while lauding history deemed advantageous to the State and its powerful vision for a utopian future.

But while keeping collective trauma out of politics, classrooms, and propaganda allowed for some semblance of interethnic stability, this policy failed to confront or eliminate narratives of victimhood nurtured, in some cases, for centuries. Thus, when Milošević directly violated

Tito’s principle of relegating the past to the past atop his elevated podium at Kosovo Polje, he knowingly opened the floodgates for historical trauma left to fester for decades. The Serbian media began “constantly identif[ying] Muslim Albanians, for example, with the old Turkish threat as the vanguard of a new Islamic menace to Serbs,” invoking centuries of internalized

Ottoman trauma.215 Meanwhile, the revocation of Albanian language education in 1989 forced

Albanians to relive eras of even more intense national oppression during the decades surrounding

World War II. Throughout the 1990s, Albanian protest groups rallied around the Albanian national emblem of a double-headed eagle used by the Albanian fascist regime and banned by

Tito’s government, provoking visceral distress among Serbs still processing loss of land, loved ones, or possessions during World War II. While the actual incidence of rape in Kosovo during the 1990s was no higher than in previous decades, accusations of Albanians raping Serbs and

Serbs raping Albanians flooded news outlets in both communities “to link perceptions of

214 Malcolm, Kosovo. 215 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 180. 68

national victimization [with] a crisis of masculinity.”216 More than one thousand unsubstantiated

allegations of Kosovar Albanian men raping Serbian women were published among Belgrade

tabloids in 1997 alone, centering rape and physical trauma as stand-ins for collective trauma.217

During this period, Frances Trix also cites that “Muslim clerics were frequently called in for

interrogation, and Orthodox crosses were often etched on the doors of their mosques.”218 While

such actions comprised an organized attempt to “provoke [Kosovar Albanians] to support their

contention that they were ‘radical Muslims who threatened the heart of Europe’ and thus should

be removed,” the defacement of mosques with Orthodox crosses also served as retaliation for the

historical trauma of Serbian Orthodox Churches converted to mosques under Ottoman rule.219

In at least one instance, this national exhumation of historical trauma was literal: in 1989,

Milošević dramatically disinterred the body of Prince Lazar, the Battle of Kosovo’s slain martyr,

and led it on a propagandist tour of Serbian-inhabited Yugoslavia, ceremonially reburying the

body in one village after another.220 Written off by contemporary foreign media as a nationalist

stunt, this physical disinterment of historic trauma served to revive the mourning process as if the

Battle of Kosovo had occurred the previous day, mobilizing an urge for renewed conflict.

According to nationalism expert Michael Geisler, the function of such an effort was “to facilitate

the wake of mourning by displacing the individual pain as well as the widespread anxiety caused

by the sudden and unexpected tear in the fabric of collective identity into the imaginary realm of

the national narrative.”221 Through the manipulative symbols invoked by Milošević and his allies

at mass rallies, “the Serbs were going through an exercise of mass catharsis... all the old fears

216 Wendy Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and ,” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 6, no. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000, 563. 217 Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo,” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 6, no. 4. 218 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 405. 219 Ibid. 220 United States Institute of Peace, Training to Help Traumatized Populations, 3. 221 Geisler, “Introduction” National Symbols, Fractured Identities, Eds. Michael E Geisler, xxiii. 69

and the old banned nationalist songs bubbled up to the surface.”222 So, too, did Kosovar

Albanian anti-government protests increasingly frame their current political disenfranchisement

as part of a long cycle of oppression, victimhood, and trauma extending far beyond Socialist

Yugoslavia’s inception. This “distorted picture of ethnic relations” endorsed by both sides fueled

“an atmosphere of resentment, hatred, and fear,” urging violent retaliation against entire nations viewed as active perpetrators of trauma endured by parents and grandparents.223

During the War:

The propagandist articles that flooded Kosovar Albanian and Serbian communities with

unsubstantiated claims of their nations’ rape and abuse at the hands of the other triggered a post-

traumatic emotional response on both sides that sought violent retaliation against the opposing

nation itself rather than merely its leaders or political institutions. Vandalism of sacred

architecture among both communities escalated to a fever pitch in the years immediately

preceding the conflict, with architectural destruction serving as a retaliatory stand-in for the

sensationalized accounts of rape and other hate crimes published daily.224 As the conflict erupted into war, cultural emblems continued to be targeted as both a means of inflicting trauma and alleviating one’s own. At Slobodon Milošević’s trial for war crimes at The Hague, one Serbian soldier would testify, crudely, that while firing upon Kosovar Albanian minarets during the

conflict his comrades would “joke that [they] were castrating the dicks of Šiptar rapists.”225

Conversely, hours after Milošević’s government signed the Military Technical Agreement to end

222 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 163. 223 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 180. 224 Penny Stanley, “Reporting of Mass Rape in the Balkans: Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose? From Bosnia to Kosovo,” Civil Wars vol. 2, no. 2 (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 74-110. 225 ICTFY, Trial of Slobodan Milošević, The Hague, 13 February 2002, Transcript; the term Šiptar is a derogatory ethnic slur for Albanians that has been recognized by the Serbian Supreme Court as racist and discriminatory since 2018. 70 the Kosovo War in June 1999, statues of Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić and writer Petar Petrović

Njegoš were torn down by Kosovar Albanian celebrants in Priština and “trailed behind tractors through the streets... while the enraged Albanian crowed was yelling ‘rapists!’ and spitting on them.”226

In the wake of the Kosovo War, Serbian nationalist propaganda and Milošević’s own defense lawyers claimed that the destruction of Kosovar Albanian architecture should not be equated to the destruction of medieval Serbian monasteries because it lacked the same degree of cultural importance.227 But even acknowledging the impossibility of equating losses of Serbian cultural heritage with those incurred by Kosovar Albanians, even vernacular buildings can become significant through their obliteration. According to architect Eyal Weizman and historian

Andrew Herscher, “violence transforms the meaning and identity of architecture in the very process of destroying it... in many cases it was destruction itself that rendered buildings as heritage,” by situating them within a far greater narrative of traumatic loss.228 The annihilation of vernacular architecture such as homes or workplaces also holds the potential to inflict an even more personal, intimate wound than that of cultural monuments or great public edifices.

Throughout 1998 and early 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians watched their homes and villages deliberately burned in an effort to prevent their return while being forced en masse from the region (see Appendix C, Figure 15). While such actions often garner less international attention than the targeting of clear cultural heritage such as the Đakovica Bazaar or

Bajrakli Mosque in Peć, the trauma endured through this architectural violence directly encouraged Albanians to, in turn, burn and loot Serbian villages upon their return to Kosovo.

226 Bishop Artemije Radosavljević, “Letter of Protest,” The Guardian, 8 July 1999. 227 Ibid. 228 Eyal Weizman and Andrew Herscher, “Conversation: Architecture, Violence, Evidence,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, vol. 8, no. 1 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011), 114. 71

“Where Serbs were unable to leave with their goods and chattels, they were looted, and in many cases, houses were torched,” notes Judah, “much of the furniture and other goods was taken by returning Kosovar Albanian refugees who had all of their possessions stolen and their houses torched while Serbian forces were still in control.”229 Images of Serbian families fleeing their own burning villages in the summer of 1999 serve as yet another point of trauma in Kosovo’s continuing cycles of retribution and reprisal (see Appendix C, Figure 16).

After the War:

The aftermath of the Kosovo War indicates that retaliatory violence against architecture fails to provide a sense of justice precisely because architectural heritage carries subjective, unquantifiable value linked to emotional collective traumas. Thus, when the KLA razed approximately 80 Serbian Orthodox Churches following the official end of the conflict in late

1999, participants in the violence countered that such destruction fell infinitely short of their immense losses during the fighting. Serbian academics, historians, and clergymen conversely decried such losses as representing “infinitely more unique worth to human history” than

Kosovar Albanian losses during the conflict.230 Architectural destruction risks becoming cyclical through this process wherein trauma incites architectural destruction which in turn perpetuates the trauma of the initial aggressor, allowing both nations to seize upon the narratives of supreme victimhood discussed earlier. The United Nations Mission in Kosovo’s failure to recognize this trauma and work towards providing closure for the conflict allowed this urge for catharsis to explode into action yet again in 2004 without organized response, signifying an imperative need for resolution remaining today.

229 Judah, The Serbs, Third Edition, 334. 230 ICTFY, Trial of Slobodan Milošević, The Hague, 13 February 2002. 72

While incited by a perceived need for catharsis, cultural destruction seems destined to be

internalized as disproportionate, escalatory, and traumatizing rather than healing. The 2004 riots

show that the anguish of architectural loss remains felt by both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs;

even the generation born after the war continues to internalize the myths of supremacy and fears

of extermination that have come to rely on historical trauma. After Kosovo’s declaration of

independence in 2007, Serbs living in northern enclaves of Kosovo lashed out at architecture

again, immediately burning down customs posts along the Kosovo-Serbia border and

demonstrating that, barring major efforts to reshape current nationalist narratives, historical

trauma will continue to situate architecture in its crosshairs.231 Architectural theorist Teresa

Stoppani argues that:

“architecture is not only a container, a supporter, but a product of life... a cultural and symbolic production, always invested with political and ideological meanings that reflect those of the society it hosts and represents. Architecture changes with life and culture; in this sense, it lives through its inhabitants.”232

If architecture, especially architecture imbued with cultural importance through nationalist

narratives, lives through the communities that inhabit or utilize its spaces, then its destruction

must also be understood as a death. Urban planner Jwanah Qudsi founded the Aleppo Heritage

Fund after witnessing the tremendous architectural heritage in her home city during the ongoing

Syrian Civil War.233 Reflecting on the relationship between architecture and trauma, she agrees

with Stoppani’s assessment and adds that “losing architectural heritage is different from losing a

friend or a relative or a neighbor in conflict because you are effectively losing a piece of

yourself.”234 And yet, despite the importance of architecture, nations all too often fail to mourn

231 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab, 413. 232 Teresa Stoppani, “Architecture and Trauma,” Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, Eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 133-149. 233 Ongoing at the time of current writing, May 2021. 234 Jwanah Qudsi, zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris, 13 April 2021. 73 architectural destruction to the extent such trauma necessitates. “We have funerals for people, but not buildings,” Qudsi reflects, “which means there’s no catharsis or resolution to the trauma.”235 Unaddressed, this perceived need for catharsis can fester across generations, waiting for nationalist narratives that can again seize upon its eruptive anger.

235 Qudsi, zoom interview, 13 April 2021. 74

Conclusion

During the ten years immediately preceding the Kosovo War and throughout the conflict itself, Kosovar Albanian and Serbian nationalist narratives promoted through political speeches and propagandist media linked architectural heritage to myths of supremacy, fears of destruction, and cycles of historical trauma. Through these efforts, architecture symbolically challenged narratives of belonging, stood in the way of lasting security, and triggered a perceived need for retaliatory catharsis. Despite surviving centuries of upheaval, medieval monasteries and Ottoman

mosques, Kosovar Albanian bazaars and Serbian villages became weaponized by the

chauvinistic pursuit of a purified territory. The ethnosymbolist approach to nationalism asserts

that nationalist violence stems from both a long history of opposing realities and the deliberate

manipulation of symbols representing these contradictory collective memories. Specifically,

Anthony Smith’s framework cites hostile myths, ethnic fears, and opportunity as necessary

preconditions for chauvinistic mobilization. In Kosovo, the myths, fears, and traumas invoked by

Milošević and the KLA dated far beyond their rise to power; they were merely seized upon by

leaders and the media as emblems necessitating aggression recontextualized as retaliatory justice

to ensure the nation’s continued supremacy and survival. Within this framework, architecture

serves as both a symbol weaponized through these narratives and a primary target of violence.

This is because it’s “impossible to separate our architecture from our identity... we internalize

our external environments,” and, in turn, project our internal narratives, anxieties, aspirations and

traumas onto our surroundings.236

This thesis focused on architectural destruction as a lens for discussion of chauvinist

nationalism and the violence it incites. In Kosovo, motivations prompting armed forces and

236 Qudsi, zoom interview, 13 April 2021. 75 civilians to inflict damage upon the architectural landscape often overlapped or directly drew from rhetoric motivating other violence, from rape to ethnic cleansing. Further research is necessary to determine the extent to which this thesis’ theoretical framework of myths, fears, and traumas may also help explain other forms of nationalist violence, but the evidence presented here clearly demonstrates the cruciality of incorporating both historical and contemporary contexts, narratives, events, and symbols into such lines of inquiry. Modernist scholarship seeking to explain nationalist conflict often highlights the short-term causes at the expense of long-term historical background which, as this paper demonstrates, is so often invoked, recycled, and manipulated by nationalists to legitimize their rhetoric. However, the speeches, newspaper articles, and direct actions discussed in this thesis and linked to specific cases of architectural destruction show that key nationalist leaders or organizations retain direct responsibility for promoting violence even when doing so through the use of preexisting narratives.

While post-conflict peacebuilding efforts in Kosovo have helped facilitate the prosecution of a few key individuals responsible for inciting such violence, Smith’s underlying preconditions for nationalist conflict remain omnipresent throughout both Kosovar Albanian and

Serbian sociopolitical life. And so, after explaining which relationships with chauvinist nationalist rhetoric enabled architecture to be so successfully manipulated as a sociopolitical symbol and narrative tool in Kosovo, the next questions remain: how can we move past this inflammatory brand of nationalism? How can we break the cycles of retribution demonstrated throughout Kosovo’s history, during the Kosovo War itself, and in the 2004 uprisings?

Efforts to rebuild physically or emotionally from the Kosovo War remain largely hindered by the conflict’s perceived status as paused rather than resolved. The current geopolitical ambivalence over Kosovo’s statehood bolsters fears of extermination and continues

76

to imply the inferiority of Kosovo’s independence in much the same way as its former status

under Socialist Yugoslavia. So long as Kosovar independence remains unrecognized by Serbia

and a majority of the world’s countries, the looming threat of war continues to prevent the

effective deconstruction of those same nationalist narratives that ignited the Kosovo War more

than twenty years ago. If the international community can facilitate negotiations between Serbs

and Kosovar Albanians to secure a more mutually beneficial and politically normalized future, it

will through doing so lay the groundwork for deconstructing existential fears internalized for the

past four decades. International recognition could also expand opportunities for long-term investment in Kosovo, in turn discouraging the nationalist narratives of scapegoating so often invoked by societies facing economic duress.

By helping to alleviate the continued threat of nationalist narratives, normalizing relations between Kosovo and Serbia should be seen as a crucial precondition for meaningful efforts to preserve Kosovo’s remaining architectural heritage. However, I submit that architectural

preservation work itself may also help normalize relations between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians

within the newly independent state. According to post-conflict expert Jose-Maria Arraiza, “due to its deep symbolic connection with identity, cultural heritage management can clearly contribute to either promote or hamper post bellum reconciliation and cohesion in ethnically divided societies,” providing tremendous potential for Kosovo’s political, social, and economic regeneration.237 Historic and cultural preservation has been proven to promote economic growth

and boost social morale, but even more importantly “the establishment of fair mechanisms for

managing cultural heritage in highly divided societies after conflicts can be crucial for the

sustainability of peace, given its relevance and inter-linkages with retribution, reconciliation,

237 Arraiza, “A Matter of Balance,” Presented at Seminar on Property and Investment in Jus Post Bellum, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, June 2014, The Hague. 77

rebuilding.”238 And Kosovo remains heavily divided. While some have recently sought to

describe Kosovo as a monoethnic state, as many as 130,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo; this

population must be included in any successful efforts to rebuild.239 Unfortunately, the

reconstruction of cultural and religious heritage throughout Kosovo has grown increasingly

controversial since the country’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008.

Before 2008, the responsibility for restoring cultural sites throughout Kosovo largely fell

onto the international community; without an official government, Kosovo had few resources or

infrastructure to facilitate the necessary reconstruction. Donations from foreign states and non-

governmental organizations during this period often carried religiously-charged motivations:

while Turkey primarily funded the restoration of Ottoman Muslim heritage, the United States

almost exclusively funded the restoration of Serbian Orthodox Christian sites.240 Since declaring

independence, Kosovo’s young government has begun to assert more of a role in financing or

organizing its own restoration efforts; as one would predict, the almost entirely Albanian Muslim

government has predominately sought to advance and accelerate the reconstruction of mosques

and other Kosovar Albanian cultural heritage. Today, destroyed Serbian Orthodox churches

remain primarily restored by international funds and non-profit organizations while Kosovar

Albanian architectural sites receive most funding for reconstruction in direct cooperation with

Kosovar authorities.241 Indeed, the restoration of Serbian cultural heritage within Kosovo

remains extremely unpopular among Kosovar Albanian politicians and citizens, with prominent

238 Arraiza, “A Matter of Balance,” Presented at Seminar on Property and Investment in Jus Post Bellum, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, June 2014, The Hague; Gjejlane Hoxha and Kaltrina Thaci, “The Protection of Cultural Heritage Properties in the Republic of Kosovo,” First International Conference on Architecture and Urban Design, Epoka University, Tirana, June 2013. 239 European Stability Initiative, The Lausanne Principle: Multiethnicity, Territory, and the Future of Kosovo’s Serbs (Berlin: European Stability Initiative, 2004), 53. 240 Dimitri G Demekas, Kosovo: Institutions and Policies for Reconstruction and Growth, (Washington: IMF, 2002). 241 Demekas, Kosovo. 78

Kosovar Albanian leaders even endorsing a conspiracy that Serbian troops and citizens largely destroyed their own cultural heritage in an effort to garner international sympathy.242 Notably, over fifty percent of Kosovo’s police force and parliament are comprised of former KLA members who continue to dominate power structures in the independent state and chart a course towards their vision of reconstruction.243

As a result of these political factors, Serbs have largely avoided working with Kosovar

Albanian compatriots to ensure the restoration of their own cultural heritage. When the Kosovar government signed an agreement with the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade to oversee the restoration of several key Serbian heritage sites in 2008, then-bishop Artemije Radosavljević blocked the and unequivocally refused to allow Kosovar Albanians to assist with any Serbian Orthodox church restoration.244 In 2011, NATO’s peacekeeping force handed over control of key protected sites of importance to Serbs to Kosovo’s police force, prompting

Serbian protests that their sacred sites now lay “in the hands of Albanian extremists.”245 Mere weeks after this transition, Kosovar Albanian police forces failed to protect Prizren’s fourteenth- century Church of Our Lady of Ljeviš from vandalism of the roof that left its precious frescoes exposed to rain. In 2015, when Kosovo sought official membership in NATO that would afford them direct funding to restore the world heritage churches burned and looted during the 2004 uprisings, “Serbs gathered inside the Gračanica Monastery and placed photographs of destroyed

Serbian orthodox churches on the ground to spell out the slogan ‘No Kosovo in UNESCO.’”246

Serbs have no trust for Kosovar Albanians governing their holy sites, at least so long as the

Kosovar government and police force remain largely filled with former KLA soldiers.

242 Demekas, Ibid. 243 Trix, “Kosovo,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Second Edition, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab. 244 Balkan Insight, “Serbs Split on Restoring Kosovo Churches,” 22 May 2008. 245 Balkan Insight, “Heritage Handover to Embitters Serbs,” 4 May 2011. 246 Balkan Insight, “Serbs Demonstrate Against Kosovo’s UNESCO Bid,” 21 October 2015. 79

This failure of collaborative reconstruction efforts to, as of yet, deescalate nationalist tensions in Kosovo echoes a larger failure by the international community to confront nationalist narratives in the Balkans. According to foreign policy expert Ted Galen Carpenter, NATO’s

“Balkan policy was marked by inconsistency and double-standards bordering on incoherence,” demonstrating a profound disinterest in proactively leading reconstruction.247 Both corruption and nationalist thrived in the spaces between NATO oversight and that of the innumerable other non-governmental organizations, peacekeeping troops, grants, and United Nations missions operating within their own disconnected spheres. NATO’s peacekeeping missions in the Balkans fundamentally underestimated nationalism’s potency as a sociopolitical force, with the result that, by Carpenter’s assessment, “bitter ethnic divisions persist, making effective political cooperation nearly impossible.”248

Meanwhile, UNESCO’s failure to successfully safeguard Kosovo’s World Heritage listed medieval churches from destruction during the 2004 riots demonstrates that a different approach is also needed for protecting architectural heritage: one that acknowledges the role of architecture within nationalism and seeks to protect it from these narratives as much as to provide for its physical safety. In its current form, UNESCO bears no structure for effectively ensuring or enforcing the protection of listed sites, begging the question that if the highest international arbiter for cultural importance cannot ensure the protection of sites deemed to be of

“outstanding universal value,” what can?249 Advocates for cultural heritage protections such as

Andrew Herscher and Andras Riedlmayer initially hoped that the ICTY could play a stronger role in protecting Kosovo’s architectural heritage from further destruction, but “the statute of the

247 Ted Galen Carpenter, NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur (Washington DC: The Cato Institute, 2019), 138. 248 Carpenter, Ibid, 18. 249 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “The Criteria for Selection,” United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Accessed 7 May 2021. 80

ICTY does not use the term ‘cultural property’…the absence of explicit reference to cultural

property correlates to the lack of a uniform definition of this concept in international

instruments.”250 Because cultural heritage lies outside the purview of the court best equipped to

vouch for it, Riedlmayer’s testimony at the Hague Tribunal in June 2010 unfortunately devolved

into inconclusive questions on “who can speak on behalf of architecture?”251 Of course, both

Kosovar Albanians and Serbs have been continuously embittered by what both sides perceive as

unfairness regarding the ICTY. For Kosovar Albanians, the Hague Tribunal is a sham that has

failed to justly punish those responsible for their immense suffering during the war. For Serbs,

on the other hand, the KLA has evaded justice and been effectively granted complete control

over a unilaterally independent Kosovo despite its own brutality. With no clear, trusted

leadership ascribing guilt to architectural destruction or advocating on its behalf, “the war remains deeply contested and the competing narratives are politically instrumentalized.”252

If and international law cannot prevent architectural destruction, should it be understood as an inevitable facet of nationalist conflict going forward? Certainly the destruction incurred in Kosovo and the corresponding international outcry failed to safeguard architectural heritage in the Syrian Civil War or Afghanistan War. Barring a dramatic change in current

strategy, Herscher and Riedlmayer warn that the Kosovo War may be indicative of a “new form

of conflict” wherein “destruction of historic monuments now constitutes an essential

component.”253 But, again, I submit that architectural violence through the actions of individuals

must never be interpreted as an inevitability; such destruction is the direct result of nationalist

narratives and while there may be little hope in treating the symptoms of such narratives, perhaps

250 Abtahi, “The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict,” Harvard Human Rights Journal vol. 14, no. 1. 251 Weizman and Herscher, “Conversation,” Future Anterior vol. 8, no. 1, 118. 252 Florian Bieber, “Bosnia-Herzegovina Since 1991,” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989, Eds. Ramet and Hassenstab (New York: Cambridge U P, 2019), 355. 253 Herscher and Riedlmayer, “Monument and Crime,” Grey Room, no. 1, 109. 81 through concentrated effort we may address the cause. Architectural destruction – in Kosovo and elsewhere – can be deterred if academics, politicians, and the media are willing to play a more active role in confronting and deconstructing the chauvinist nationalism that would see it destroyed. The horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia that so often occurred under the watch of peacekeeping troops, from Bosnia’s to Kosovo’s 2004 uprising, prove that nationalism remains far stronger than existing international political institutions. As nationalism remains unlikely to disappear, we must therefore reemphasize efforts to break the cycles of retribution demanded through certain inflammatory nationalist rhetoric.

Recognizing that these final policy implications lie outside the scope of my research, I concur with Stuart Kaufman’s assessment that “preventing [nationalist] war means preventing extremist politics by limiting opportunity in the short run and changing the hostile myths and attitudes in the long run.”254 In the short term, the Kosovar government could develop a constitutionally mandated education and reconstruction program requiring Serbs and Kosovar

Albanians to work together to protect their history. Education systems in both Serbia and Kosovo could enlist third parties to review and ban or design culturally sensitive curricula around inflammatory texts such as The Mountain Wreath that remain taught without acknowledgement of dangerously nationalist undertones.255 Serbian enclaves within Kosovo could be better integrated into Kosovar Albanian institutions and infrastructure to prevent radical separatism.

Public schools in Kosovo could be secularized and integrated to prevent religious zealotry. Non- governmental organizations operating in Kosovo could be required to include components of interethnic reconciliation in future projects.256 Integrated cultural venues promote new non-

254 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 215. 255 Ibid, 216. 256 Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 217. 82 chauvinistic mythologies celebrating diversity and shared history. Any treaty signed by Serbia to recognize Kosovo could stipulate the necessity for several such integration programs that could, over time, fundamentally reassert the Kosovar State as a multi-national one. Since Kosovo remains the poorest country in Europe, restoration and reconstruction work will continue to depend on international support. However, this funding could be gradually entrusted to the

Kosovar government rather than to the current tapestry of non-governmental organizations and foreign governments with competing national allegiances and religiously motivated agendas.

In the long term, Kosovar history should be reframed and reconsidered as one history rather than two competing narratives. Integrated education and social programs as previously mentioned remain key to such an approach, but integrated economics and politics are also crucial preconditions for a multi-national state based on mutual trust and mutual stewardship of cultural heritage. Currently, Kosovar Serbs have no option but to participate in marginalized ethnic parties within the Albanian-dominated Kosovar government. A ban on ethnic parties seems beside the point now, when both ethnic groups cling to massively separate interests largely motivated by the same myths, fears, and traumas of twenty years ago. But Kosovo must, eventually, build a framework within its government system to ensure that political parties can or must move beyond ethnic identifications. It may seem absurd to reconsider Kosovo as a multi- national state when such a supermajority of the country is Kosovar Albanian, but the future of

Europe’s youngest country depends largely upon its ability to attain such a rebranding. Kosovo will never cease to be of vital importance to Serbs and the Kosovar Albanian majority is unlikely to shift; Kosovo’s wealth of historical and religious heritage can thus only be protected from nationalist chauvinism through its rejection.

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“Cultural heritage is meant to bring people together... to help people bridge their differences and find meaning in sharing something beautiful and valuable,” reflects Serbian

Archimandrite Friar Sava Janjić, the abbot of Kosovo’s Visoki Dečani Monastery.257 The continued national polarization within Kosovo indicates that rebuilding alone will not allow architectural heritage to achieve such a role. Kosovar Albanians and Serbs who internalized images of their sacred sites burning during the conflict and lost irreplaceable heritage central to their identity need cathartic release from their trauma so that those same symbols cannot be repurposed and manipulated in the future. While physical reconstruction remains crucially important, permanently breaking the cycle of destruction and safeguarding Kosovo’s heritage for future generations depends upon efforts to publicly acknowledge, address, and – above all – mourn these devastating losses in a way that provides both explanation and closure.

257 Quoted in Malagurski, Kosovo: A Moment in Civilization. 84

Appendices

Appendix A: Toponyms and Terms

Figure 1: Reference Table of Toponyms

Serbian spelling (Latin script) Albanian spelling

Kosovo Kosova Priština Prishtinë Šar Mountains Sharr Mountains Prizren Prizren Kosovo Polje Fusha e Kosovës Peć Pejë Preševo Valley Preshevë Valley Prekaz Prekaz Orahovac Rahovec Landovica Landovicë Đakovica Gjakovë Vučitrn Vushtrri Ibar River Ibër River Zubin Potok Zubin Potoku Sečište Seqishta Beli Drim Valley Drini i Bardhë Valley

Figure 2: Reference Table of Terms

anglicized spelling Serbian spelling (Latin script) Albanian spelling millet milet milet vilayet vilajet vilajeti banovinas banovine banovinasa kulla, kullas kula, kule kullë, kullasa tekke, tekkes tekija, tekije teqe, teqetë devshirme levy danak u krvi devshirmeja

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Appendix B: Maps

Figure 1: Ethnic Structure of Kosovo According to the 1991 Census

Ivan Vukičević, Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija Ethnic Structure by Settlements According to 1991 Census, 2009.

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Figure 2: Linguistic Structure of Kosovo According to the 2011 Census

Lazar Ilić, Linguistic Structure of Kosovo According to the 2011 Census, 2011.

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Figure 3: Administrative Divisions or Banovinas of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1939

Prometni zemljevid z označno banovin Kraljevine Jugoslavije [Traffic Map with the Banovinas of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia], commissioned by Laboratorij Sušak [Sušak Laboratory] (: 1939).

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Figure 4: Demographics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1940

Albanian populations indicated in blue, in the lower right-hand quadrant

Manfred Straka, Jugoslawien: Volkliche Gliederung Mehrheitsgebiete unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutschtums [Yugoslavia: National Majority Divisions with Special Consideration of Germanness], commissioned by Generalstab des Heeres [General Staff of the Army], Abteilung für Kriegskarten und Vermessungswesen [War Maps and Surveying Department] (Graz: Südostdeutsches Institut [Southeast German Institute], 1940).

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Figure 5: Cultural and Religious Heritage Damaged or Destroyed, March 1998 – October 1999

Note that the “Civil” label includes Albanian-language libraries, government buildings of greater symbolic importance to Serbs, and other structures of importance to both cultures.

SENSE Transitional Justice Center, “Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey,” Targeting History and Memory (Pula: SENSE Transitional Justice Center, 2016), accessed 23 April 2021.

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Appendix C: Selected Photographs

Figure 1: Patriarchal Monastery of Peć, built 1321-1337 partially burned by Kosovar Albanian protesters, March 1981

photograph by author, 21 July 2014

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Figure 2: , Peć, built 1471 burned by Serbian military, March 1999

photograph by Ludo Kuipers, 15 July 1967

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Figure 3: Bajrakli Mosque, Peć, built 1471 burned by Serbian military, March 1999

photograph by András Riedlmayer, June 1999

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Figure 4: League of Prizren Museum Building, built 1777 destroyed by Serbian police grenades, March 1999 (reconstructed June 2000)

photograph by author, 22 July 2014

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Figure 5: Islamic Archives of Priština, built 1890 burned by Serbian police, June 1999

photograph by author, 20 June 2016

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Figure 6: Zočište Monastery, built early 1300s heavily damaged by KLA, July 1998 dynamited by KLA, September 1999

photograph by Stefana Radić, September 2007

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Figure 7: Zočište Monastery, built early 1300s heavily damaged by KLA, July 1998 dynamited by KLA, September 1999

photograph courtesy of Zočište Monastery, November 1999

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Figure 8: Priština Bazaar, built 1500s-1700s destroyed under Yugoslav government urban development initiative, 1947-1968

postcard, circa 1900

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Figure 9: Priština Bazaar, built 1500s-1700s destroyed under Yugoslav government urban development initiative, 1947-1968

photograph courtesy of The City of Prishtinë, circa 1965

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Figure 10: Church of Christ the Savior, built 1992 construction halted in 1998

photograph by Arild Vågen, February 2013

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Figure 11: Church of Our Lady of Ljeviš, built 1306-1307 burned and heavily vandalized by Kosovar Albanian rioters, March 2004

photograph by Vladimir Vukotić, June 1980

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Figure 12: Monastery of the Holy Archangels, built 1343-1352 burned and heavily vandalized by Kosovar Albanian rioters, March 2004

photograph by Nikola Besević, March 2004

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Figure 13: Church of the Holy Trinity, built late 1300s heavily damaged by KLA, August 1999 destroyed by Kosovar Albanian rioters, March 2004

photograph courtesy of the National Herald, 2019

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Figure 14: Serbian village near Ibar River being burned by Albanian paramilitaries, 1941

photograph courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavije [Museum of the Revolution of the Nations of Yugoslavia]

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Figure 15: Serbian paramilitaries burn Kosovar Albanian houses in Sečište (Seqishta) village, March 1999

photography by Louisa Gouliamaki, courtesy of Balkan Insight

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Figure 16: Serb residents flee Kosovo’s Beli Drim (Drini i Bardhë) Valley as KLA troops burn their houses, July 1999

photograph by Jean-Philippe Ksiazek, courtesy of Agence France-Presse (AFP)

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Bibliography

Abtahi, Hirad. “The Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict: The Practice of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 14, no. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. This paper, released immediately after the armed conflict in Kosovo, analyzes and critiques the structures in place for persecuting the destruction of cultural property as a war crime under international law. It cites numerous examples of case rulings assigning responsibility for architectural destruction to Yugoslav leaders and demonstrates how the architectural destruction in Kosovo can be understood to fit within this context and thus be prosecuted as such.

Agjencia e Statistikave të Kosovës. Vlerësim: Popullsia e Kosovës 2011 [Census: Populations of Kosovo 2011]. Republic of Kosovo. Priština: Kosovo Agency of Statistics, 2013. The only official post-war census conducted by the Kosovar government in 2011 provides important demographic information for my research. The census found that approximately 93% of Kosovars are ethnically Albanian, less than 2% identify as ethnically Serbian, and around 5% belong to other ethnic minorities. While the United Nations considers these results unreliable because of a partial Serb boycott of the census, Albanians certainly comprise the vast majority of modern Kosovo’s population. Kosovar Albanians speak a non-Slavic language isolate using Latin script and, according to this census, primarily adhere to Sunni Islam although some practice Bektashi Sufism and Catholicism. This census should be complemented with Yugoslav censuses from the pre-war era to successfully capture the complex demographic shifts in this region during the Kosovo War.

Agjencia e Statistikave të Kosovës. Vlerësim: Popullsia e Kosovës 2019 [Census: Populations of Kosovo 2019]. Republic of Kosovo. Priština: Kosovo Agency of Statistics, 2020. While not an official census of the entire Kosovar population, this census uses a representative sample to provide information and informed estimates about the nature of Kosovo’s population at present.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Publishing, 2016. Benedict Anderson, a vocal modernist in the field of nationalist theory, proposes in this seminal work that nations consist of ‘imagined communities’ that must be taught – they are essentially arbitrary tools used by competing elites to generate mass support. Modernists like Anderson argue that nationalist violence is rational and recent – usually the result of economic issues and employed through the manipulations of the ruling class. Anderson has been heavily criticized by primordialists for rejecting the idea that people may be naturally predisposed towards living in cooperation with their ethnic, religious, or linguistic communities. Similarly, ethnosymbolists have criticized his work for not placing enough emphasis on the role of nationalist symbols in shaping a national consciousness independently from and sometimes in direct opposition to the ruling elites.

Antić, Čedomir. The History of Serbia. Belgrade: Laguna Publishing, 2018. A comprehensive history of the Serbian nation stretching from the Neolithic Period to the twenty-first century, this book written by Serbian historian Čedomir Antić presents an academic but still subtly nationalist view of the many events and periods that have shaped Serbia’s current mentality. While Antic relies on facts for his research, his language in describing the conflict in Kosovo often feels rather apologist and self-victimizing. However, this is an important document in capturing how Serbs popularly view and interpret their own history – which often more powerfully affects socio-politics than factual history itself.

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Arraiza, Jose-Maria. “A Matter of Balance: Cultural Heritage, Property Rights, and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Kosovo.” Presented at Seminar on Property and Investment in Jus Post Bellum, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, June 2014, The Hague. A highly critical seminar talk discussing the case of an ethnically mixed Kosovar village where an overprotective approach to cultural heritage in the wake of Kosovo’s 2004 protests directly clashed with displaced peoples’ rights. Arraiza critiques “special protective zones” in Kosovo and stresses the need for a fair balance between property rights protection and cultural heritage preservation.

Avramov, Smilja. Genocide in Yugoslavia. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995.

B92. “11 Years Since ‘March Pogrom’ of Serbs in Kosovo.” 17 March 2015. https://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics.php?yyyy=2015&mm=03&dd=17&nav_id=93505.

Bacevich, Andrew J. America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. New York: Random House, 2016. Bacevich’s condemnation of American military policy of the last several decades groups the NATO-led intervention in the Kosovo War into America’s long line of interventions in the Middle East. His views of the Kosovo conflict are extremely culturally ignorant and occasionally incorrect, but represent an important example of one of the problematic ‘narratives’ that has sought to explain the Kosovo War as a conflict of foreign interests rather than one provoked by domestic nationalist rhetoric.

Balkan Insight. “Heritage Handover to Kosovo Police Embitters Serbs.” 4 May 2011. https://balkaninsight.com/2011/05/04/heritage-handover-to-kosovo-police-embitters-serbs/. News article summarizing reactions to NATO’s handover of key protected sites of Serbian cultural importance from their peacekeeping forces to Kosovo’s police force. This handover prompted a Serbian response that their sacred sites now lay in the hands of Albanian extremists, reigniting fears of cultural erasure and destruction. Mere weeks after this transition, Kosovar Albanian police forces would fail to protect the fourteenth-century Church of Our Lady of Ljevis (a UNESCO world heritage site) from vandalism that left its precious frescoes exposed to rain.

Balkan Insight. “Serbs Demonstrate Against Kosovo’s UNESCO Bid.” 21 October 2015. https://balkaninsight.com/2015/10/21/kosovo-s-unesco-bid-battle-continues-on-twitter-10- 20-2015/. News article covering the 2015 protests inside Kosovo’s Gračanica Monastery, where Serbs placed photographs of destroyed Serbian orthodox churches on the ground to spell out the slogan ‘No Kosovo in UNESCO.’ These protests were held in response to the Kosovar government’s pursuance of official membership in NATO that would allow them to direct funding to restore the world heritage churches burned and looted during the 2004 uprisings. The article demonstrates that Serbs have no trust for Albanians governing their holy sites.

Balkan Insight. “Serbs Split on Restoring Kosovo Churches.” 22 May 2008. https://balkaninsight.com/2008/05/22/serbs-split-on-restoring-kosovo-churches/. News article showing how Serbs have avoided working with Albanian compatriots to ensure the restoration of their own cultural heritage. When the Kosovar government signed an agreement with the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade to oversee the restoration of a couple key Serbian heritage sites in 2008, local Orthodox bishop Artemije Radosavljević blocked the arrangement. This article discusses his unequivocal refusal to allow ethnic Albanians to assist with any Serbian Orthodox church restoration.

Berisha, Ibrahim et al. Serbian Colonization and Ethnic Cleansing of Kosovo: Documents and Evidence. Priština: University of Kosovo Press, 1993.

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Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. Second Edition. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. Bevan’s research presents evidence from global conflicts around the world concerning the weaponization of architecture and repercussions of such actions on sociopolitical reconstruction. He stresses the importance of viewing architecture as testaments to national myths, legends, histories, narratives, memories; thus, when the architecture itself is removed, the entire narrative linked to the architecture appears vulnerable to extinction.

Bieber, Florian. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Since 1991.” In Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989. Second Edition. Eds. Sabrina P Ramet and Christine M Hassenstab. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 342-361.

Bieber, Florian. “Nationalist Mobilization and Stories of Serb Suffering: The Kosovo Myth from 600th Anniversary to the Present.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 6, no. 1. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2002. 95-110. Historian Florian Bieber describes how the Battle of Kosovo myth was resurrected in the 1980s and employed to incite violence in the 1990s under Slobodan Milošević. Explores different interpretations given to the historical battle, the manipulability of historical facts, and how myths as a nationalist symbol are employed for political ends. Highlights the circular conception of time put forward by nationalist ideology with the implied repetitions of the medieval battle in the Twentieth Century. Can be considered to align with the modernist school of nationalist theory, wherein elites deliberately manipulate the masses to ensure fealty to the nation and their own political agendas.

Bishop Artemije Radosavljević. “Letter of Protest.” The Guardian. 8 July 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jul/08/balkans4.

Block, Robert and Christopher Bellamy. “Croats Destroy Mostar’s Historic Bridge.” The Independent. 10 November 1993. A contemporary news report from The Independent citing reports that Croatian nationalist troops deliberately bombarded the historic bridge in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, due to its strategic and symbolic importance to the city’s rival Bosnian Muslim militias and civilians.

Bologna, Caroline. “How is Collective Trauma Different from Individual Trauma?” Huffington Post. 9 April 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/collective-trauma- meaning_l_606cc3cfc5b6c70eccaa99cd.

Bracewell, Wendy. “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 6, no. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 563-590.

Brass, Paul R. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. First Edition. New York: SAGE Publications, 1991. Brass asserts that ‘ethnicity and nationalism are not givens, but rather social and political constructions,’ citing them as modern phenomena ‘inseparably connected with the activities of the modern centralizing state.’ These conclusions place Brass strongly within the modernist school of nationalist study. Brass’ theoretical framework stresses the presence of elite competition as a precondition for nationalism. According to Brass, nationalism is by definition a political movement requiring heavy organization, skilled leadership, and resources.

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Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State. First Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Modernist scholar of nationalism John Breuilly lays out in this text not so much a theory of nationalism as a crucial outline and procedure for the study of nationalism. He was among the first nationalist scholars to assert nationalism as originating from politics rather than from society. For him, nationalism refers to ‘political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such action with nationalist arguments.’

Brosché, Johan, Mattias Legnér, Joakim Kreutz, and Akram Ijla. “Heritage Under Attack: Motives for Targeting Cultural Property During Armed Conflict.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 23, no. 3. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2017. 248-260. This article broadly discusses the motives for attacking sites, buildings, or objects representing cultural heritage during armed conflict. It identifies four broad categories of motives and provides some academic context for the rationalization of cultural destruction – a theoretical structure for research about why, when, and by whom cultural property is targeted. The organized destruction in Kosovo seems primarily to fall under the first category of motives outlined here, “conflict goals,” wherein cultural property is targeted because its mere existence is inherently connected to the issue over which the warring parties are fighting.

Carpenter, Ted Galen. NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur. Washington DC: The Cato Institute, 2019. A searing critique of NATO in its post-Cold-War context that includes a detailed account of NATO’s failures to successfully lead in the aftermath of its interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. While certainly an argumentative rather than objective text, the book accurately criticizes NATO for its inability to prevent architectural destruction both in 1999 and during the 2004 uprising.

Curry, Andrew. “Here Are the Ancient Sites ISIS has Damaged and Destroyed.” National Geographic. 1 September 2015. Accessed 5 March 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-isis-destruction-looting-ancient- sites-iraq-syria-archaeology.

Defreese, Michelle. “Kosovo: Cultural Heritage in Conflict.” Journal of Conflict Archaeology, vol. 5, no. 1. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2009. 257-269. Defreese’s paper focuses on the deliberate destruction of Kosovo’s Decani Monastery and Hadum Mosque to contextualize the nature of heritage in conflict with respect to international cultural heritage law. Useful for its legal perspective and for highlighting the broader significance of cultural property in conflict.

Demekas, Dimitri G. Kosovo: Institutions and Policies for Reconstruction and Growth. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2002.

Demoli, Donjeta. “Kosovo Mulls Fate of Milošević-Era Cathedral.” Balkan Insight. 31 October 2012.

Djukić, Slavoljub. Izmedju Slave I Anateme: Politička Biografija Slobodana Miloševića. Belgrade: Press, 1994. An interesting contemporary political biography of Slobodan Milošević that includes perspectives on his revival of Serbian nationalism. Written several years prior to the Kosovo War, during the height of the .

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Duijzings, Ger. “Religion and the Politics of ‘Albanianism’: Naim Frashëri’s Bektashi Writings.” In Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 60-69. Duijzings’ essay provides a helpful perspective on the role of religion within Albanian national communities and the importance of Bektashi Sufism to Albanian cultural identity even among participants of other faiths.

Durham, Edith. High Albania. London: Edward Arnold, 1909. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/ women/durham/albania/albania.html. The oldest travelogue written by a Western European woman in Kosovo, Durham’s colorful accounts and observations in High Albania help link present day nationalist trends to those present in Ottoman Kosovo nearly 100 years prior to Kosovar independence.

The Economist: Johnson Books & Arts Column. “Hysteria Over Hyphens.” The Economist. 10 June 2017. Accessed 22 February 2021. https://www.economist.com/books-and- arts/2017/06/08/hysteria-over-hyphens.

Ende, Kai. “Report on the Situation in Kosovo” for the United Nations Security General. 15 July 2004. A firsthand account and broad official report on the 2004 uprisings within Kosovo that resulted in widespread architectural destruction of Serbian Orthodox Churches and monuments.

European Stability Initiative. A Future for Prishtina’s Past. Priština: European Stability Initiative, 2006.

European Stability Initiative. The Lausanne Principle: Multiethnicity, Territory, and the Future of Kosovo’s Serbs. Berlin: European Stability Initiative, 2004.

Everts, Daan. Peacekeeping in Albania and Kosovo: Conflict Response and International Intervention in the Western Balkans, 1997-2002. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Fischer, Bernd Jurgen. Albania at War, 1939-1945. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. A detailed historical account of Fascist Albania and the violence incurred throughout Kosovo during World War II as the Fascist Albanian government sought to expel Serbian inhabitants.

Fitzherbert, Evelyn and Brian Moody. “Monuments and Myths: Country Life in Kosovo.” Country Life. London: IPC Magazines, 1999. Reports on the perceived threat to Kosovo’s religious monuments and their decoration during the Kosovo War. Written with an emphasis on Serbian monasteries at risk of vandalism in the war’s immediate aftermath.

Fredericksen, Carsten and Frode Bakken. Libraries in Kosova/Kosovo: A General Assessment and a Short and Medium-Term Development Plan. Copenhagen: International Federation of Library Association and Institutions, 2000. Published just months after the Kosovo ceasefire agreement was finalized, this report to the United Nations’ Interim Administration Mission in Kosova evaluates the destruction of libraries and archives around the country and suggests strategies for reconstruction. It emphasizes that there is no cooperation or

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contact between Albanian and Serbian professionals in Kosovo and describes how these nationalist divisions may form roadblocks in creating a functioning library network.

Geisler, Michael E. “Introduction: What Are National Symbols and What Do They Do To Us?” National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative. Eds. Michael E Geisler. Middlebury: Middlebury College Press, 2005. xiii-xlii.

Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804-2011. Updated Edition. New York: Penguin Group, 2012. A sprawling history of Balkan geopolitics across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Balkans explores commonalities across the Balkan region, raises questions about Western intervention, and traces the rise of nationalism across the peninsula.

Herscher, Andrew. “Counter-Heritage and Violence.” Future Anterior vol. 3, no. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 24-33.

Herscher, Andrew. “Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post- Yugoslavia.” Curating Difficult Knowledge. Eds. E Lehrer et al. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 147-160.

Herscher, Andrew. “Urbicide, Urbanism, and Urban Destruction in Kosovo.” Theory & Event, vol. 10, no. 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218087.

Herscher, Andrew. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010. The most detailed account, at time of current writing, of architectural destruction incurred during the Kosovo War. Herscher’s book surveys specific acts of architectural destruction and strings these individual case studies into a historic narrative. However, the text is more focused on actions rather than the motivations driving the violence within Kosovo.

Herscher, Andrew and András Riedlmayer. “Monument and Crime: The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo.” Grey Room, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 108-122.

Howe, Marvine. “Sacred Serbian Site Damaged by Blaze.” The New York Times. 21 April 1981.

Hoxha, Fatos. Zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris. 28 February 2021. Hoxha is a former member of the Kosovo Liberation Army who is currently a member of the Kosovar National Assembly. We connected by way of his son who is a former journalist that I relied upon as a contact during my time working as a journalist out of Belgrade, Serbia.

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Hoxha, Gjejlane and Kaltrina Thaci. “The Protection of Cultural Heritage Properties in the Republic of Kosovo.” First International Conference on Architecture and Urban Design, Epoka University, Tirana, June 2013. Written by two renowned Kosovar architecture scholars, this rather biased paper lauds the Kosovar government’s reparation efforts toward Serbian Orthodox monasteries and churches since the 2004 protests and sharply attacks the Serbian government for unfairly holding Kosovar cultural properties – especially archaeological and ethnological museum collections – hostage. This paper explores the treatment and conservation of Kosovo’s built heritage within this difficult context, with an interesting focus on administrative mechanisms responsible for managing their protection and enhancement.

Human Rights Watch. “Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, March 2004.” Human Rights Watch vol. 16, no. 6. New York: Human Rights Watch, July 2004.

Ilić, Lazar. Linguistic Structure of Kosovo According to the 2011 Census. 2011. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY). Trial of Slobodan Milošević. The Hague, 13 February 2002. Transcript.

Janićijević, Jovan. The Cultural Treasury of Serbia. Second Edition. Trans. Alice Copple-Tošić. Belgrade: Idea Publishing, 2001. Effectively an encyclopedia of Serbia’s cultural heritage (including that of Kosovo), this collection of essays highlights numerous architectural sites affected by the Kosovo Conflict. The text contextualizes the historical, cultural, and artistic importance of such sites, especially Serbian Orthodox churches targeted in the 2004 uprising which remained intact at the time of this book’s publication.

Jashari-Kajtazi, Teuta and Arta Jakupi. “Interpretation of Architectural Identity Through Landmark Architecture: The Case of Prishtina, Kosovo from the 1970s to the 1980s.” Frontiers of Architectural Research, vol. 6, no. 4. Beijing: KeAi Publishing, 2017. 480-486. Discusses efforts to reform Kosovar society and promote cross-cultural cohesion through architecture in Yugoslav Kosovo, with particular focus on the creation of monumental modernist buildings replacing Ottoman spatial centers. The article stresses the importance of narratives of architectural identity and the effects of Yugoslav architecture on the Kosovar social psyche.

Jerliu, Florina. “Preservation of City’s Heritage in the Contemporary State-Building Context: The Case of Prishtina.” Architecture & Science Journal, vol. 1, no. 2. Prishtina: University of Prishtina Press, 2014. 45-56.

Jerliu, Florina. Skype interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris. 1 April 2021. Jerliu is the head of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Priština in Kosovo. She has published works on architectural preservation and destruction within the city of Priština, specifically.

Judah, Tim. “Author’s Note.” The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Third Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xvi-xvii.

Judah, Tim. Kosovo: War and Revenge. Second Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Third Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. An essential secondary text tracing Serbian national history from the medieval period to the present, The Serbs features a detailed account of Milošević’s rise to power and successful manipulation of symbols. Judah’s writing illuminates common themes of national pride, self-victimization, and fears of extermination across Serbia’s long history.

Kalman, Harold. “Destruction, Mitigation, and Reconciliation of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 23, no. 6. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2017. 538-555. A discussion of urbicide and identicide in global conflict that provides a wider context for the attacks on historic architecture in Kosovo. Kalman describes reconstruction as “an ideological act and a destructive activity, since it erases memories of the violence and removed physical evidence.” Instead, he proposes alternative means for reconciliation that memorializes destroyed cultural heritage while acknowledging the trauma.

Kaufman, Stuart. Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. The ethnosymbolist frame analysis and comparative historical analysis methodologies blended together in this thesis drew heavily from the approach of Stuart Kaufman in this text, where the author compares four case studies of ethnic conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia, Transnistria, and the former Yugoslavia. Stuart reaches similar conclusions regarding the causes of ethnic conflict more broadly, but this text does not mention or investigate architecture as a lens for capturing the link between nationalist rhetoric and violence. Heavily influenced by previous research by Anthony Smith, the text does not discuss the Kosovo War but helps situate this conflict within the wider field of nationalist warfare.

Kinney Harris, Benjamin. “The Creation of Albanianism: Carefully Constructed Roles of Symbols, Language, and Mythology in the Development of Albanian Nationalism, 1850- 1912.” Senior Thesis, Middlebury College Department of History, Middlebury, VT, 2015. My undergraduate thesis was written on the early formation of Albanian national identity under Ottoman Rule. While primarily investigating early nationalism in Albania-proper, this paper draws a number of conclusions about the uniqueness of Albanian national identity drawn upon in this subsequent thesis work.

Kosovo Between War and Peace: Nationalism, Peacebuilding, and International Trusteeship. Eds. Tonny Brems Knudsen and Carsten Bagge Lausten. London: Routeledge Publishing, 2006.

Kosovo Liberation Army Recruitment Pamphlet. Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës [Kosovo Liberation Army]. 1998. Accessed with the assistance of the library of the University of Priština in Kosovo.

Kostovicova, Denisa. Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space. London: Routledge Publishing, 2005.

Kostovicova, Denisa. “Shkolla Shqipe and Nationhood: Albanians in Pursuit of Education in the Native Language in Interwar and Post-Autonomy Kosovo.” In Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 157-171.

Koštunica, Vojislav. “Kosovo je Srbija.” Speech, Belgrade, 21 February 2008.

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Krieger, Heike. The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974- 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

KTV News Report. 17 March 2004. Accessed via National Library of Kosovo Media Resource Center, 20 April 2021.

Levinsohn, Florence Hamlish. Belgrade: Among the Serbs. Chicago: Ivan Dee Publishing, 1994.

Malagurski, Boris. Kosovo: A Moment in Civilization. Vancouver, BC: Malagurski Cinema, 2017.

Malcolm, Noel. Kosovo: A Short History. London: Pan Books, 1998. A good introductory history of Kosovo published concurrently with the outbreak of the Kosovo War.

Maniscalco, Fabio. “The Loss of the Kosovo Cultural Heritage.” Kosovo and Metohija, 1998- 2000. Paris: International Council on Monuments and Sites, 2006. http://webjournal.unior.it/Dati/18/54/2.%20Kosovo,%20Maniscalco.pdf. Renowned historical preservation policymaker Fabio Maniscalco discusses the situation of cultural properties in Kosovo in this memorandum highly critical of NATO’s ineffective peacekeeping forces. He urges the international community to take a stronger role in protecting cultural heritage in Kosovo.

Меморандум САНУ [Memorandum SANU]. Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1986. Accessed via the Peace Palace Library, The Hague.

Mihajlović, Luka. Zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris. 11 February 2021.

Milošević, Milan. “The Media Wars: 1987 – 1997.” In Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia. Eds. Jasminka Udovički and James Ridgeway. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Milošević, Slobodan. “Говор на Газиместану [Gazimestan Speech].” Kosovo Polje, 28 June 1989.

Misha, Piro. “Invention of a Nationalism: Myth and Amnesia.” In Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 33-48.

Mojzes, Paul. “Balkan Wars 1912-1913: An Unrecognized Genocide.” Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. 25-44.

Morel, Anne-Françoise. “Identity and Conflict: Cultural Heritage, Reconstruction, and National Identity in Kosovo.” Architecture MPS, vol. 3, no. 1. London: University College London Press, 2013. 1-21. The Battle of Kosovo mythos features heavily in Serbian nationalist rhetoric surrounding the Kosovo conflict. In her paper which draws heavily from Anthony Smith’s theories of ethnosymbolist nationalism, Morel describes the evolution of this myth and the way it was weaponized by nationalist agendas.

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Mulchinock, Niall. NATO and the Western Balkans: From Neutral Spectator to Proactive Peacemaker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Njegoš, Petar II Petrović. Gorski Vijenac [The Mountain Wreath]. Vienna: Mekhitarist Monastery of Vienna, 1847. Considered a pinnacle of Serbian literary achievement, this problematic epic poem centers upon the decimation of Muslim villages for failing to convert to Christianity. Balkan scholar and political analyst Tim Judah has described the poem, which remains widely taught in Serbian schools today, as a ‘paean to ethnic cleansing’ that explains how the Serbian national consciousness has inextricably linked national liberation to the murder of neighbors and burning of their villages.

Ordev, Igor. “Erasing the Past: Destruction and Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Former Yugoslavia: Part 1.” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 28, no. 4. Newburg, OR: George Fox University Press, 2008. 16-29. A helpful summary of the architectural destruction endured in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the breakup of Yugoslavia. While Ordev’s essay does not grapple with architectural destruction in Kosovo, it introduces helpful structures for considering cultural heritage and the impacts of its destruction more broadly. It also provides a solid parallel example of systematic architectural destruction in the Balkans by nationalist politicians and military complexes.

OSCE Mission in Kosovo. “Cleaning of Defaced Road Signs in Kosovo.” 13 November 2017. Youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwU2s2Gg5As.

Ovenden, Richard. “Sarajevo Mon Amour.” Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. London: John Murray Publishing, 2020. 153-168

Özkırımlı, Umut. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Third Edition. London: Palgrave Publishing, 2017.

Pantelić, Bratislav. “Nationalism and Architecture: The Creation of a National Style in Serbian Architecture and Its Political Implications.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 16-41. Serbian architectural historian Bratislav Pantelić evaluates the history of Serbian architecture from the mid- nineteenth century to the present, especially with regard to Serbo-Byzantine architectural trends that sought to erase Ottoman history from the architectural landscape and return to Serbia’s medieval roots. Discusses the resurgence of nationalism in the 1980s which was accompanied by a spate of church-building in the Serbo-Byzantine style, reasserting its position as the canonical style of the Orthodox church and pitting Serbian architecture against Ottoman architecture. Also emphasizes how architecture articulated national policy and maintained the national and religious unity of fractured Serbian communities.

Pavličić, Jelena. “Dissonant Heritage and Promotion of Tourism in the Case of Serbian Medieval Monuments in Kosovo.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, vol. 14, no. 3: Tourism, Conflict, and Contested Heritage in Former Yugoslavia. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2016. 189-205. Serbian political scholar Jelena Pavličić discusses in her paper how popular tourist publications within Kosovo continue to open an “unfounded” debate over Serbian medieval monuments within Kosovo. She asserts that these publications are “used to alienate the historical identity of these places or to promote a distorted interpretation of them.” Illuminates many of the frustrations Serbs feel with the current situation regarding historical preservation within Kosovo.

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Pelaia, Ariela. “The Great Revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple.” Learn Religions. 19 March 2019. Accessed 5 March 2021. https://www.learnreligions.com/what-was-the- great-revolt-2076681.

Pennington, Anne and Peter Levi. Marko the Prince: Serbo-Croat Heroic Songs. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984.

Politika. “Није Готово! [It’s Not Over!],” 22 February 2008.

Politika. “Специјални Додац о Говору на Газиместану [Special Feature on the Gazimestan Speech],” 29 June 1989.

Prometni zemljevid z označno banovin Kraljevine Jugoslavije [Traffic Map with the Banovinas of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia]. Commissioned by Laboratorij Sušak [Sušak Laboratory]. Zagreb: 1939.

Qudsi, Jwanah. Zoom interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris. 13 April 2021. Qudsi is the founder of the Aleppo Heritage Fund – an organization currently working to reconstruct key historic sites within the Syrian city of Aleppo. She is an urban planning expert who also works full-time for the United Nations. While Kosovo is not her area of expertise, she was interviewed to share perspectives on the field of historic reconstruction and on the traumatic effects of architectural destruction brought about through war.

Ramet, Sabrina P. Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value, Transformation, Education, and Media. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.

Ramet, Sabrina P. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991. Second Edition. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992.

Ramet, Sabrina P. Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Reuter, Jens. “Albaniens nationale Frage [Albania’s National Question].” Der Kosovo Krieg: Ursachen, Verlaug, Perspektiven [The Kosovo War: Causes, Courses, Prospects]. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2000.

Rexha, Enver. Skype interview by Benjamin Kinney Harris. 23 March 2021.

Riedlmayer, András. “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace: Destruction of Libraries During and After the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.” Library Trends vol. 56, no. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 107-132.

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Riedlmayer, András. “The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1996: A Post-War Survey of Selected Municipalities.” Report to the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In Unity and Plurality in European Cultural Diversity. Eds. Forum Bosnae. Sarajevo: Međunarodni Forum Bosna, 2008. 146-173. Reproduces the text of Riedlmayer’s report to the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on the destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina (especially the burning of Sarajevo’s National and University Library) during the 1992-1995 conflict in that country. An important primary document capturing the scale and impact of architectural destruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina that foreshadows similar (and even more widespread) attacks in Kosovo.

Roudometof, Victor. “Toward an Archaeology of National Commemorations in the Balkans.” National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative. Eds. Michael E Geisler. Middlebury: Middlebury College Press, 2005. 35-59.

Saggau, Emil Hilton. “Kosovo Crucified—Narratives in the Contemporary Serbian Orthodox Perception of Kosovo.” Religions, no. 10 (October 2019): 578.

Schwandner-Sievers, Stephanie. “Narratives of Power: Capacities of Myth in Albania.” In Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Eds. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd Jurgen Fischer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 3-25.

Sell, Louis. Slobodan Milošević and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2002.

SENSE Transitional Justice Center. “Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey.” Targeting History and Memory. Pula: SENSE Transitional Justice Center, 2016. Accessed 23 April 2021. http://heritage.sensecentar.org/.

Serbenco, Eduard. “The Protection of Cultural Property and Post-Conflict Kosovo.” Revue Québécoise de Droit International, vol. 18, no. 2. Montréal: McGill University, 2005. https://www.sqdi.org/wp-content/uploads/18.2_-_serbenco.pdf.

Shils, Edward. “Nation, Nationality, Nationalism, and Civil Society.” Nations and Nationalism vol. 1, no. 1. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.

Shukriu, Edi. “Spirals of the Prehistoric Open Rock Painting from Kosova.” International Journal for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences vol. 35. Lisbon: International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, 2006.

Silber, Laura and Allen Little. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. Revised Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

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Skendi, Stavro. The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Likely the most thorough and seminal text on Albanian nationalism and its roots under Ottoman rule. Skendi’s historical text demonstrates the origins of several core Albanian nationalist narratives that remain prevalent in Kosovo today. As this book was itself written over a half-century ago, it has also become a historical document in of itself, and a close analysis of Skendi’s research also illuminates ways in which modern understandings of Albanian nationalism have changed.

Skendi, Stavro. “Religion in Albania During the Ottoman Rule.” Südost-Forschungen vol. 15. Regensburg: Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, 1956. 311-327.

Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991. This text best summarizes Anthony Smith’s approach to ethnosymbolism, tracing the origin of nations to earlier ethnie communities and demonstrating their durability over time through the symbols, myths, and legends to which they cling. This critique of modernist nationalist thought remains highly criticized by nationalist scholars for being terminologically confused – yet the work remains highly influential for its overview of national symbols and their importance to different nations around the world.

Stanley, Penny. “Reporting of Mass Rape in the Balkans: Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose? From Bosnia to Kosovo.” Civil Wars vol. 2, no. 2. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 1999. 74-110.

Staub, Ervin, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Alexandra Gubin, and Athenase Hagengimana. “Healing Reconciliation, Forgiving, and the Prevention of Violence After Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology vol. 24, no. 3. New York: Guilford Press, 2005. 297-334.

Stefanović, Vidosav. Milošević: The People’s Tyrant. London: IB Tauris, 2004.

Stoppani, Teresa. “Architecture and Trauma.” Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. Eds. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2016. 133-149.

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